The role of parental alcohol-specific communication in early adolescents’ alcohol use☆
Introduction
Effective communication between parents and children is considered an important characteristic of good family functioning (Barnes and Olson, 1985, Baumrind, 1980, Jackson et al., 1998) and a key to solving parents’ problems with their children and adolescents (Ackard et al., 2006, Noller and Callan, 1990). One issue parents confront when their children become adolescents is alcohol use. Parental behavior specifically directed at dealing with alcohol use in adolescents is called alcohol-specific socialization (Jackson et al., 1999, Van Der Vorst et al., 2005). There are a number of alcohol-specific socialization strategies, including showing disapproval of the adolescent's alcohol use, encouraging the adolescent not to drink, and setting house rules about alcohol use. The most direct way for parents to express these rules and desires to their offspring is verbal communication. This direct expression, referred to as alcohol-specific communication (Ennett et al., 2001, Miller-Day, 2008), is fundamental to understanding how parents influence their child's alcohol use. Yet, the few studies that have examined links between alcohol-specific communication and adolescent alcohol use have shown inconsistent results. In an effort to help resolve the matter, we examined in the present study the bidirectional relation between frequency of alcohol-specific communication and adolescents’ alcohol use.
Communication, including alcohol-specific communication, is multi-dimensional. These dimensions include its frequency, quality, and content, as well as the strategy it represents, such as discussion or asking questions (Boone and Lefkowitz, 2007). Open communication, which refers to the ability to share feelings, approach difficult topics, and ask for help (Riesch et al., 2006), is considered as high quality communication, and talking frequently is assumed to be a characteristic of good family functioning. In this context, it is interesting that parents report not talking often with their teenagers about alcohol-related issues (Kelly et al., 2002, Miller-Day, 2008, Van Der Vorst et al., 2005). According to studies on US samples, alcohol is rarely the main topic of conversation between parents and adolescents; instead, it tends to be just a part of the ongoing back-and-forth of family life (Miller-Day, 2002). If one or both parents drink alcohol, the likelihood that they will initiate conversations about this topic with their children is further reduced (Ennett et al., 2001). Although parents tend to encourage their children not to drink (Miller-Day, 2008), they do not often discuss with them the negative consequences of alcohol use, nor do they provide information about alcohol (Boone and Lefkowitz, 2007). Mothers, in particularly, ask their adolescents questions about their drinking behavior only if alcohol is already a topic in the conversation.
Still, parent–child communication is considered a central feature in dealing with adolescent drinking. This fact is evident in European and North-American prevention programs that advocate increased parent–child communication about alcohol or aim to improve parents’ alcohol-specific communication skills as a way to reduce alcohol use in youth (e.g., Komro et al., 2008, Robertson et al., 2003, Rueter et al., 1999). The idea seems to be that openly talking about alcohol with adolescents lessens the chance that adolescents and parents will consider alcohol taboo, or it strengthens family relationships, thereby enhancing the ability of families to protect their teenagers from alcohol involvement and consequently lower overall youth alcohol consumption (Rueter et al., 1999). Prevention workers recommend that parents talk with their offspring about the positive and negative effects of alcohol use, relevant house rules, and so forth. Several of these interventions appear to be unsuccessful (e.g., Komro et al., 2008). Perhaps, because the empirical evidence of the preventive effect of parent–child communication on adolescents’ drinking is limited and has received little attention in scientific research.
The few mainly cross-sectional studies that have examined alcohol-specific communication have tended to focus exclusively on the frequency of alcohol-specific communication with adolescents (Ennett et al., 2001, Jackson et al., 1999, Spijkerman et al., 2008, Van Der Vorst et al., 2005). However, more research is needed because of inconsistency in the results and methodological problems. The latter include measuring communication generally rather than alcohol-specific communication (Booth-Butterfield and Sidelinger, 1998, Ackard et al., 2006), including questions about tobacco use (Ennett et al., 2001), or using one-item measures (Ackard et al., 2006, Jackson et al., 1999).
Surprisingly, some studies have revealed a positive association between frequency of alcohol-specific communication and adolescents’ alcohol use (Spijkerman et al., 2008, Van Der Vorst et al., 2005). This positive association might indicate that frequent conversations about alcohol lead to heavier alcohol use. These authors suggested that the parents’ conversations with their children might not have been constructive, or that the positive association might represent the forbidden fruit effect, which means that talking about a prohibited subject triggers ones’ curiosity and consequently makes one decide to explore the “forbidden fruit” by oneself. In other words, talking about alcohol might trigger adolescents’ curiosity, thereby actually encouraging them to drink. On the other hand, parents might simply be reacting to their child's behavior. The causality is reversed: the adolescent's alcohol use increases parents’ alcohol-specific communication (Bell, 1968). This latter explanation can be tested by (a) comparing how frequently the parents of children who abstain from alcohol use, children who drink only small amounts, and children who drink moderate to large amounts communicate about alcohol, and (b) by testing a cross-lagged model comparing adolescents with these different alcohol consumption patterns. In particular, comparing cross-lagged models across different alcohol groups may provide insight into whether parents are responding to their child's behavior, and, if so, whether the response depends on the amount of alcohol the adolescent drinks.
Furthermore, other authors found a non-significant relation between alcohol-specific communication and adolescents’ alcohol use (Ennett et al., 2001, Jackson et al., 1999), or showed that a low level of parent–child communication in general is associated with heavier substance use including alcohol (Ackard et al., 2006). These contrasting findings might be due to variations in designs. In our opinion, extending previous research by using a longitudinal design in which the effect of frequency of alcohol-specific communication on alcohol use, and vice versa, is taken into account are best suitable to test the relevance of frequency of alcohol-specific communication.
Ackard et al. (2006) stressed that the effects of parent–child communication might differ for boys and girls (see also Noller and Callan, 1990). For instance, mothers ask their sons more questions about alcohol than they ask their daughters (Boone and Lefkowitz, 2007). However, it also seems that mothers talk in general more often with their daughters than with their sons (Leaper et al., 1998). For example, mothers have more frequently conversations about sexual matters (Lefkowitz et al., 2002, Turnbull et al., 2008) and emotions (Kuebli and Fivush, 1992) with their daughters than with their sons. Taken together, these findings indicate that it is useful to test gender differences in studies on the frequency of alcohol-specific communication and alcohol use as well.
The current study examined the bidirectional relationship between frequency of alcohol-specific communication and alcohol use in early adolescence using a longitudinal design (Fig. 1). Possible differences in the frequency of alcohol-specific communication between boys and girls, as well as whether the influence of alcohol-specific communication on alcohol use differs by gender and level of alcohol consumption, were also tested. Given that previous cross-sectional studies in this area have yielded inconsistent results, we made no specific predictions about the possible association between alcohol-specific communication and adolescents’ drinking behavior.
Section snippets
Participants and procedure
The data were taken from an ongoing longitudinal project (Family and Health) examining the different socialization processes that influence adolescents’ health-related behavior (e.g., Van Der Vorst et al., 2005). For many years, the average number of children in a Dutch family has been 1.7 (Programmaministerie voor Jeugd en Gezin, 2008). Based on this statistic, we chose to limit the sample to families with two children in the Family and Health project. As the majority of Dutch parents are
Descriptive analyses
For frequency of alcohol use, a main effect was found for time F(2,419) = 48.30, p < .001 (Table 1). Both males and females reported an increase in frequency of alcohol use across the three time points. For intensity of alcohol use, the main effect for time was qualified by an interaction with gender, F(2,413) = 7.33, p = .001. Follow-up analyses revealed that, whereas both males and females reported increased consumption of alcohol across the time points, males reported higher levels of use than
Discussion
The current study examined the bidirectional effects between frequency of alcohol-specific communication and early adolescents’ alcohol use. We also tested whether gender and the amount of alcohol use moderated these effects. The initial model confirmed suggestions from previous studies that frequency of alcohol-specific communication predicts subsequent adolescents’ alcohol use: the more often the parents talked with their adolescent child about alcohol at T2, the more the adolescent drank at
Role of funding source
The survey data used in this study were collected as part of the “Family and Health” project, which was funded by a grant to Rutger Engels by the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (NWO: 016-005-029; 400-05-051).
Contributors
All authors were involved in the design of this specific study. Haske van der Vorst reviewed the literature and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. William Burk and Haske van der Vorst undertook the statistical analysis. All authors contributed to revisions of the paper. All authors contributed to and have approved the final manuscript.
Conflict of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
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A supplementary data table is available with the online version of this article. Please see Appendix A.