Having dinners at home with family every day may help prevent alcohol use in adolescents. Researchers at the Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston looked at factors associated with alcohol use and binge drinking among more than 5,500 boys and girls involved in the Growing Up Today Study. Questionnaires completed by the adolescents, who were 11-18 years old in 1998, identified 611 girls (19 per cent) and 384 boys (15 per cent) that started drinking alcohol during the one-year follow up. Of those who started drinking, 24 per cent of the girls and 29 per cent of the boys further engaged in binge drinking. The most exciting finding of the study is that eating dinner as a family is a simple way by which parents might be able to delay or prevent their teenager's uptake of drinking. It was found that girls who ate dinner with family at home daily were less likely to start drinking than girls who had dinner at home with family on some or most days. Moreover, girls who participated in daily family dinners, and had not yet considered initiating alcohol use, were more than 50 per cent less likely to start drinking than their counterparts who participated in fewer family dinners. On the other hand, girls with a higher social self-image and boys with a higher athletic self-image were more likely to start drinking than girls and boys with lower levels of self-esteem. Also associated with the initiation of alcohol use were smoking, adult drinking in the home, having an underage sibling who drinks, peer drinking, older age, more advanced physical maturation, having positive attitudes towards alcohol use, and owning or using items that promote alcohol products. Furthermore, binge drinking among girls was associated with having positive attitudes towards alcohol, an underage sibling who drinks, or owning alcohol promotional items such as clothing or accessories; while binge drinking among boys was associated with a positive attitude toward alcohol and older age. Therefore, eating family dinner at home every day may be a simple way to delay alcohol use among some adolescents. Since alcohol promotional items appear to encourage alcohol use and binge drinking in adolescents, alcohol industry may need stricter marketing restrictions
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine,
October 2007