Strategy May Not Succeed in Reducing Teen Drinking

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With beach and vacation season in full swing, and teens as apt to give in to peer pressure as ever, parents of adolescents may be anxious to try strategies to minimize the odds that their children will drink too much alcohol and suffer the often devastating consequences. One tactic for limiting teens' desire to imbibe that has gained popularity of late is for parents to provide opportunities for their teens to drink in supervised contexts as a way to foster responsible drinking. But a recent study discovered that adult-supervised drinking is in fact associated with higher levels of harmful alcohol use by teens than is the case for teens who lived in an area with a "zero-tolerance" approach to alcohol use by minors. Alcohol consumption in general was equivalent for teens under the contrasting approaches.

Read more about this surprising finding in Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/12/16.1.full.