Researcher Decries Parental Permissiveness on Drinking

A Penn State researcher says that parents who let teens drink alcohol may be setting their kids up for binge drinking in college, but the study by Caitlin Abar of the school’s Prevention Research and Methodology Center makes no distinction between parents who simply let kids drink some wine during meals and those whose permissiveness extends to drinking outside the home.

Science Daily reported June 11 that Abar surveyed 300 college freshmen and correlated their alcohol use to the drinking rules set down by their parents. Abar found that students whose parents never allowed them to drink were less likely to report heavy drinking in college.

On the other hand, “the greater number of drinks that a parent had set as a limit for the teens, the more often they drank and got drunk in college,” said Abar.

Abar said the research argues in favor of “zero tolerance” for teen drinking and against the theory that parental restrictions on drinking casts alcohol as attractive “forbidden fruit” and leads to greater temptation to drink in college. Whether or not parents themselves drank had little impact on college binge drinking, Abar added.

Thirty-one states allow parents to legally serve alcohol to children under age 21.
The research was presented at a meeting of the Society for Prevention Research.

For the full article, click here.

Lower Drinking Age Associated with Poor Birth Outcomes

A recent study from the University of Georgia concludes that lowering the legal drinking age could affect the rate of unplanned pregnancies and pre-term births among young women.

The findings suggest that lowering the drinking age makes alcohol more accessible to young people, which could lead to an increase in unplanned pregnancies. Unexpected pregnancies, in turn, result in negative birth outcomes for infants, since teens who get pregnant unexpectedly are less likely to get good prenatal care and may not be as interested in the child as someone who had planned to get pregnant, according to Angela Fertig, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor at the UGA College of Public Health.

The study appeared in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Health Economics. You can view the abstract here.