Family dinners may avert adolescent drinking

By Joene Hendry

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Eating daily dinners at home with family may help prevent alcohol use in young adolescents, study findings suggest.

Laurie B. Fisher, SM, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues 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 percent) and 384 boys (15 percent) that started drinking alcohol during the one-year follow up.

Of those who started drinking, 24 percent of the girls and 29 percent of the boys further engaged in binge drinking, the researchers report in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

The most exciting finding of the study, Fisher told Reuters Health, "is eating dinner as a family is a simple way that parents might be able to delay or prevent their teenager's uptake of drinking."

The researchers 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 percent less likely to start drinking than their counterparts who participated in fewer family dinners.

By contrast, 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, the investigators note.

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, the researchers report.

SOURCE: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, October 2007