How To Manage Teen Drinking (The Smart Way)

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Hobart and Smith sociology professor H. Wesley Perkins, who conducted the 1996 study, was intrigued by these findings. If teenagers--conformers by temperament--believe drinking is rampant on campus, might they be more inclined to pick up the habit? If on the other hand, they knew that the heavy drinkers were not in the majority, might moderation suddenly seem more attractive?

In 1997 Hobart and William Smith spent about $2,000 to find out. With the help of posters and newspaper ads, college officials publicized the fact that a majority of students on campus drank twice a week or less, that the majority of seniors consumed four or fewer drinks at parties, and that three-quarters of the alcohol on campus was consumed by just one-third of the students. The same messages popped up as screen savers on university computers.

Over the first two years, the university measured a 21% drop in high-risk drinking, which is imbibing five or more drinks in a sitting on a weekly basis."That's a massive reduction when nationally those levels were flat or increasing slightly," says Perkins. The incidence of missed classes, unprotected sex, property damage and liquor-law violations also decreased.

The program, which has been dubbed the "social-norms" approach, is in effect at a number of other colleges--with similarly sparkling results. Northern Illinois University has seen a 44% reduction in binge drinking, Western Washington University is down 20% and the University of Missouri-Columbia is down 18%. One limitation to any college-based program is that many kids are arriving on campus with drinking problems. Fully half of binge drinkers do not wait for the freedom of college before they begin elbow bending in earnest; they start while they're still at home. "Colleges are inheriting behaviors learned in high school," says social psychologist Henry Wechsler, who heads Harvard's study on drinking among young people.

Precollege drinking is especially worrisome given a central finding of recent alcohol research. Dr. Hoover Adger, professor and pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has found that children who start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to be alcohol dependent as adults. According to other studies, kids who start drinking early are also 10 times likelier to be involved in a fight after consuming alcohol, seven times likelier to be involved in a car accident and 12 times likelier to be injured. "Clearly, there is a huge benefit to delaying the first drink," says Adger.

But how on earth do you do that? Various surveys have shown that determined minors have a relatively easy time getting their hands on liquor, even if it's not kept in their own homes. They find adults who will buy it for them, or they use fake IDs, which today are widely available on the Internet.

Brenda Conlan and Jeffrey Wolfsberg, recovering alcoholics who founded Lifestyle Risk Reduction, which runs alcohol-education workshops for high schoolers and their parents, have made an informal study of nondrinkers and what keeps them sober. The most consistent nondrinkers, they've found, had unusually sound relationships with their parents, fearing less their discipline than the idea of disappointing them. "They have a relationship that means something to them," Conlan says.

Other researchers are confirming the primacy of the parent in keeping kids off alcohol. "If you look at two subsets," says Adger, "young people with good parental monitoring and those without, the difference in alcohol use is staggering." Among kids whose parents stay on top of their behavior, only about 10% drink at all, never mind drinking excessively, he says. That may seem an obvious finding. Still, it's reassuring to know that such a commonsense approach can yield such extraordinary results.