Teens Who Drink With Adult Supervision Have More Problems

Think twice the next time you have a drink with your teen son or daughter.

A new study finds that teens who drink with adult supervision have more drinking-related problems than their peers whose parents don’t allow them to drink.  

This isn’t shocking to us. 

We’ve been bringing attention lately to the problem of parents permitting their underaged children to drink alcohol in their homes because they think it’s a safer place to drink.

The study’s lead researcher, Barbara McMorris, pointed out: "Kids need parents to be parents and not drinking buddies.” She added: "Adults need to be clear about what messages they are sending."

Researchers at the University of Washington studied 1,945 teenagers from Washington state and Australia. They chose to include teens from both the U.S. and Australia because the two countries have different attitudes about teens and drinking, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

The Washington kids reflected America's general zero-tolerance attitude, which includes the under-21 drinking ban, the newspaper said. The other group represented Australia's more relaxed view, in which more parents let their kids drink with them than do American parents.

The study found that the Australian youths reported more drinking, more drinking around adults, and more drinking that led to fights, blackouts, regrettable sex and addiction than did the Washington youths, the newspaper reports.

Read more here.