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Parents may need to look at their own drinking habits and attitudes if they want to help change their teenagers' approaches to drinking.
Teens who have seen their parents drunk are more than twice as likely to get drunk in a typical month, a newly released survey found.
The survey, from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, found that 51 percent of 17-year-olds have seen one or both of their parents drunk. And 34 percent of 12- to 17-year-old respondents have seen one or both parents drunk.
Teen drinking behavior is strongly associated with how teens think their fathers feel about the teens' drinking, center officials said. Compared with teens who think their father is against their drinking, the officials said, teens who believe their father is OK with their drinking are 2½ times likelier to get drunk in a typical month.
It's not so much that teens decide to act like their parents, said Dr. Todd Stull, a psychiatrist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who reviewed the survey's findings.
“A lot of that processing happens outside of our conscious awareness,” Stull said.
“We know that environment can shape the neurochemistry in our brain,” he said. “Once you start to do something enough, the brain starts to change structurally and functionally.
“The ‘learning' and ‘reward' areas of our brain start to change, and they get a new signal stamped in.”
A parent's lecture telling teens that they're not old enough to drink, Stull said, won't be as effective as that parent demonstrating control over his or her own drinking and behavior.
“Don't tell me, show me,” he said.
The survey also asked 12- to 17-year-olds how fast they can get prescription drugs to get high. More than one-third of the surveyed teens said they could get such prescription drugs within a day; nearly one in five could get them within an hour.
When asked where they would get the drugs, the most common sources were home, parents, other family members and friends, the survey found.
For the second year in a row, more teens said prescription drugs were easier to buy than beer.
The firm that conducted the survey interviewed 1,000 12- to 17-year-olds and 452 of their parents. The sampling error was plus or minus 3.1 percent for teens and plus or minus 4.6 percent for parents.
Contact the writer:
444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com
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