Abstract
The role of the family as the social environment in shaping adolescent lifestyle has recently received substantial attention. This study was focused on investigating the association between familial and parenting predictors and alcohol use in school-aged children. Adolescents aged 13- and 15-year from a representative sample (N = 3715) of schools in Lithuania were surveyed during the spring of 2014. The methodology of the cross-national Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study was applied. HBSC international questionnaires were completed in the classroom anonymously for obtaining information about drinking of alcoholic beverages and family characteristics—family’s affluence and structure, style of communication in the family, parenting style, parental monitoring, family time together, etc. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was applied for assessment of the association between familial variables and weekly alcohol use. Analysis has demonstrated that adolescents from non-intact families tended to show significantly higher risk of being weekly drinkers (OR = 1.69; 95% CI: 1.30–2.19). The following parenting factors were associated with weekly use of alcohol: father’s and mother’s low monitoring, father’s authoritarian-repressive and mother’s permissive-neglectful parenting style. Frequent family time together and frequent electronic media communication with parents showed an inverse negative effect than was predicted. The study suggests that alcohol misuse among adolescents could be associated with a non-intact family structure as well as with complex family and parenting determinants which should be investigated more thoroughly by further studies.
Highlights
Alcohol is one of the most important ill health determinants in the EU and on the global scale [1,2].The potential risk of alcohol consumption to the health of young generations is demonstrated by the multiple morbidity, mortality and other international studies [3,4]
Research studies have accumulated more and more evidence that the non-intact family is less efficient at controlling the risk-taking behaviours such as smoking, alcohol use and drug abuse [17]. This is why we focused our study on showing the family determinants of alcohol use in children, and on highlighting the protective factors associated with the interpersonal relationships and parenting style, which could be applied during alcohol prevention programmes in youth
We aimed to investigate the association between alcohol use and a set of familial factors, which constitute an important component in the multicourse aetiology of alcohol use among adolescents
Summary
Alcohol is one of the most important ill health determinants in the EU and on the global scale [1,2].The potential risk of alcohol consumption to the health of young generations is demonstrated by the multiple morbidity, mortality and other international studies [3,4]. Young school students between the ages of 12 and 19 are more likely to drink alcohol rather than smoke cigarettes or use illicit drugs, including marijuana [5]. Multiple observation data demonstrate that in many cases, population-based strategies which have focused their activities on general measures, such as increases of alcohol prices or ban on advertising, have their limitations [7]. This indicates that multiple health settings, including the community, school and family should be taken into account [8]
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