Latest scientific news 28 October 2014

Parental influences and drinking behaviour in the Swiss youth

The results from a Swiss study add evidence that earlier parental influences seem to have an ongoing impact on drinking patterns of young adult men.

A recent study in Switzerland determined whether parental factors earlier in life (parenting, single parent family, parental substance use problem) are associated with drinking patterns among young men. The analysis is based on a population sample from the Cohort Study on Substance Use Risk Factors (C-SURF) which included 5,990 young men (average age 19.5 years) attending a mandatory recruitment process for the army.  The results showed that a parental substance use problem was positively associated with volume drinking, risky single occasion drinking (RSOD), volume drinking and dependency in young men. On the contrary, active parenting (monitoring, rule-setting and knowing the whereabouts of their children) corresponded negatively with RSOD, volume drinking and alcohol dependence. The authors concluded that health professionals should stress the importance of active parenting and prevent parental substance use in alcohol prevention strategies.

Steiner S, Schori D, Gmel G. Excessive alcohol consumption in young men: is there an association with their earlier family situation, Swiss Med Wkly. 2014 Sep 3;144:w14007. 

For more information about this article, read the scientific abstract here.