Parents & Family

When Parents Say 'Don't Drink,' Students Actually Listen, Scholar Reports

By David Glenn, The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com

August 22, 2005

Washington

In tens of thousands of households this month, parents will have one last anxious conversation with their 18-year-old children before sending them off to college. Don't take foolish risks, they will say, with drugs, alcohol, or sex. At the end of the talk, the parents might wipe their brows and wonder if their advice has had any effect.

The answer appears to be yes -- at least if parents are encouraged to use certain communication strategies. Recent experimental evidence suggests that parental conversations can have powerful effects on students' drinking behavior, a scholar said here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Rob Turrisi, a professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, has been working for more than six years on a simple idea: Colleges might mail pamphlets to the parents of every newly admitted student, encouraging them to talk about alcohol abuse and suggesting specific methods for navigating the conversation.

"When I first started this," Mr. Turrisi said during a panel on collegiate drinking, "some of my colleagues said I was going astray. They said, 'Parents don't have any effect here. It's all peers, peers, peers.' But out of stubbornness, or something, I kept up with this work."

Mr. Turrisi and his colleagues have developed a 30-page pamphlet that is designed to motivate parents to talk about alcohol abuse (it includes the requisite scare stories about hospitalization and date rape). It also coaches parents not to sound like nags, and "to respond constructively when their teen says something they don't like," Mr. Turrisi said.

In the most exhaustive test of Mr. Turrisi's concept, he and his colleagues sent pamphlets to the parents of several hundred college-bound high school seniors in Albany, N.Y., and Boise, Idaho. (The researchers made certain that the parents actually made use of the material by asking them to send in comments about the pamphlets, and also by later asking the students if they and their parents had talked about drinking.)

The students were periodically surveyed about their college behavior. They reported being significantly more temperate in their drinking, smoking, and sexual habits than students in a control group, whose parents did not receive the pamphlets.

Even the children of generally lax and uncommunicative parents benefited, Mr. Turrisi said. The children of the habitually least-attentive parents who received the pamphlet turned out to drink less than the children of the most-attentive parents in the control group, the study found.

Mr. Turrisi hopes that colleges will eventually use the technique on a large scale, but he wants to proceed cautiously. The University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of San Diego, Penn State, and the University of Rhode Island have all recently experimented with sending versions of the pamphlet to small fractions of the parents of their entering students. In each case, the colleges have worked with Mr. Turrisi to establish control groups, so that the effectiveness of the technique can be gauged.

In addition to keeping a careful eye on the pamphlets' effectiveness, Mr. Turrisi wants to make certain that the technique will not be used as a substitute for proven campus-based measures to prevent alcohol abuse. "We want to look at all of the stakeholders, and at how this is going to be used," he said in an interview. "Universities differ in their preparedness to implement efficacious interventions. Some universities are still at the stage of handing out key chains and pens with antialcohol messages," he said, alluding to a practice that was ridiculed during the panel.

Mr. Turrisi's work has been financed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a unit of the National Institutes of Health. His model of parent-based antidrinking interventions was described most thoroughly in a 2001 article in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.