College students who think their parents are more accepting of drinking tend to drink more, a new study shows.
“One part of this can be… not reinforcing or making jokes about college being a crazy time when everyone takes risks without consequences.”
Researchers asked students about their drinking habits and how much they believed their parents were accepting of them drinking during their first four years of college. They found that the more students thought their parents approved, the more alcohol the students tended to drink.
The study, which appears in Addictive Behaviors, suggests that parents can still influence their children well into young adulthood, says Jennifer Maggs, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.
No joke
“In the early years of college, parents can still play a role in providing positive feedback and encouragement for young adult students to make healthy lifestyle choices. One part of this can be supporting safe choices about drinking alcohol, and not reinforcing or making jokes about college being a crazy time when everyone takes risks without consequences.”
As the transition to adulthood—a phase of development that includes the college years—becomes longer, the role parents play in their children’s development during this time could also be increasing. Risky behavior, including drug and alcohol use, also tends to peak during this time, the researchers say.
While other research has looked at how parent permissibility affects how much their children drink, most studies only looked at these factors at one point in time, often in the last year of high school or early in college. The researchers say that measuring how parent permissibility and drinking changed over time would give a better picture of how the two were related.
“We gathered data on how these attitudes change from the last year of high school through the third year of college. It’s interesting because a lot of parents aren’t super permissive of drinking during high school, which makes sense,” says first Brian Calhoun, a graduate student in human development and family studies.
“But then when students get to college, they are in a different environment with much less supervision, and they’re getting closer to the legal drinking age. It ended up being interesting to see how students’ perceptions of their parents’ attitudes about alcohol changed as students moved into and through college.”
Parents and attitudes about alcohol
The researchers used surveys from 687 Penn State students that asked about the students’ drinking habits and how much they believed their parents would approve of them drinking, gathering data at regular check points across four years of college.
The analysis showed that the more students believed their parents approved of them drinking, the more alcohol they tended to drink.
“On average, students who thought their parents were more accepting of drinking tended to drink more,” Calhoun says. “Many students might have had parents who didn’t approve of drinking in high school, but when they went to college or got closer to turning 21, they believed that their parents’ attitudes relaxed and students’ drinking increased.
“However, some parents seemed to always be more accepting of their kids drinking, and other parents never seemed to be that accepting of their kids drinking.”
To learn more about these patterns, the researchers arranged the students into four groups or “clusters” according to how students’ perceptions of their parents’ permissibility changed: one group with parents who consistently didn’t approve of drinking, one with parents who consistently approved of high levels of drinking, one with parents who began approving of higher levels of drinking around age 21, and one with parents who began approving of higher levels of drinking when the students started college.
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“When you look at these groups, parents in the most permissive group were perceived as being more tolerant of high levels of drinking across the board, but the other three are at about the same level in the last year of high school,” Calhoun says.
“But then when students get to college, there seem to be noticeable differences in when parents were perceived as becoming more accepting of drinking, and those differences in timing were related to how much the students drank.”
It’s important to point out that while researchers found an association between how much students thought their parents approved of drinking and how much students drank, they can’t say for sure that parent permissibility actually causes increased drinking, Calhoun says.
It’s possible that parents only become more permissive after learning their kids are already drinking regularly. Still, the study does offer evidence that parents’ attitudes toward drinking matter.
“We’re seeing that parenting still matters during the college years,” Calhoun says. “It’s still not exactly clear what parents should be saying to college students about drinking, but what they’re saying seems to be linked with college students’ behavior.”
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Eric Loken, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, contributed to the research.
The University Life Study was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Source: Penn State
