Harnessing the power of parents to reduce adolescent alcohol consumption

Alcohol remains a leading risk factor for death and disability among 15-24 year olds globally [1]. Inadvertently, parents are playing a key role in this burden as the most common source of alcohol for adolescents who drink. In the latest Australian Secondary School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey (2022-23), 47% of secondary students who drank in the past week reported that they got their last drink from their parents [2] – a substantial increase from 29% in 1196 [3]. Parents often supply alcohol with the best of intentions, under the mistaken belief that it is a safe way to teach ‘responsible drinking’ or minimise harms [4]. However, evidence shows that parental supply increases the risk of adolescent risky drinking [5], including earlier alcohol initiation and higher levels of alcohol use contributing to a plethora of harms [6].

The good news is that parents can also be a key part of the solution. A strong parent-adolescent relationship has been found to mitigate risky health behaviours in adolescence [7]. When it comes to alcohol, parents can support their children by having open, two-way conversations; setting clear rules and expectations around alcohol (e.g. no drinking until you’re 18); knowing where their child is and getting to know their friends and friends’ parents; and being a good role model when it comes to their own drinking [6,8]. Our newly-published research [9] also shows that parents are less likely to provide alcohol if they understand that alcohol is harmful for adolescents and believe – correctly – that most other parents do not supply alcohol (less than a quarter of parents in our study had provided their teenager with a full drink of alcohol). Those parents who thought that alcohol had social benefits for teenagers were more likely to supply alcohol – but with more and more teenagers choosing not to drink [10], this is a perception that can probably be shifted.

So how can we harness this power of parents to reduce adolescent drinking? Strong evidence demonstrates that mass health communication campaigns can lead to health behaviour change [11-13]. Promisingly, Western Australia, the only Australian jurisdiction to implement regular communications campaigns targeted at parental supply, has seen reductions in the proportion of parents supplying alcohol to their underage children [14]. These campaigns have built on increased awareness of the harms of alcohol consumption built over a decade of alcohol health harm reduction campaigns in Western Australia. We don’t know whether these campaigns resonate with parents across the rest of Australia, where there has been limited investment in broader mass communications to highlight the harms of consuming alcohol.

Thanks to funding from the Medical Research Future Fund (#MRF2031308), we will be working with parents, adolescents, and a multi-disciplinary team of investigators across Australia (pictured) to co-design health communications that discourage parental supply of alcohol while supporting open communication. We will be holding co-design workshops with parents and teens across Australia over the next year to develop ideas for messaging concepts. We will then work with a professional campaign agency to develop these ideas into prototype campaign messages which we will test with parents in a national message comparison online study to assess which are most likely to be effective in changing alcohol supply behaviours. We aim to develop the most promising concept or concepts into broadcast-ready advertisements and use a repeat-exposure randomised control trial to estimate the likely effects of broadcasting the campaign on parental supply of alcohol. Finally, we will use economic analyses to quantity the potential return on investment of a national parental supply of alcohol messaging campaign. The projects’ outputs will be designed by Australian parents and adolescents, for Australian parents and adolescents to ensure that they are relevant, acceptable, and engaging. This way, we hope to assist in achieving the ambitious target set in the National Preventive Health Strategy that less than 10% of young people (14-17 year olds) are consuming alcohol by 2030 [15].

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