How parents can stop their children binge drinking

Anna-Karin Danielsson from the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has been looking into the factors behind teenage binge drinking in her Ph.D. thesis. She monitored 1,200 pupils aged between 13 and 19 between 2001 and 2006. She found that the teenagers who displayed risky behaviour at 13 were more at risk of high alcohol consumption and associated problems with their health, school work, parents and friends later. For boys the risk was reduced when parents kept an eye on what they were up to while for girls an emotionally-stable and close parent-child relationship had more of a protective effect. The study also compared drinking patterns in different countries and found that Scandinavian countries and the U.K. were different to other countries insofar as girls were just as likely to binge drink as boys.