• Mon, Oct 8 - 2:44 pm ET

New Drinking Study Confirms That Everything Is Always Mom’s Fault

Sorry moms, you better think again before reaching for that glass of wine to reward yourself for another awesome day of parenting!  As if you didn’t have enough guilt on your plates, it seems something else is your fault – the future drinking habits of your children.  The British think-tank Demos tracked the drinking patterns of 18,000 people over three decades and came to one conclusion – adults drink because their mommies did.

 The study found that at the age of 16, teenagers were mainly influenced by their peers in how much they drank, while their parents’ attitudes towards alcohol appeared to show little impact. Yet by the age of 34, the likelihood that they were “binge drinking” rose in line with how much they had thought, as a child, that their mother drank… Yet the study found no relationship between the drinking habits of fathers, and the later behaviour of their adult children.

There were many other factors that appeared to contribute to a future propensity to drink, including levels of parental warmth, tough love, and how young children were when their parents divorced.  But of course, the study chose to focus on Mom’s role in young Billy’s future craving for vodka.

The study was conducted on people born in 1970, so there may be many outdated cultural norms that contributed to skewing these results.  The most obvious being that men took a less active parenting role, weren’t home as much as mothers, and hence didn’t drink around their kids.  Instead they did there drinking the way most dignified adults who aren’t tethered to their homes prefer to do it – in a bar.  Good for them.  That certainly doesn’t mean that their drinking habits affected their children less than the habits of their wives.  It just means that their kids weren’t seeing them drink.

I think mom’s have enough to feel guilty about in their day-to-day lives without researchers taking minute samples of the population and making sweeping generalizations and accusations about women and their role in screwing up their kids.  We already know everything is our fault.  You don’t have to reach 30 years into the past to prove it to us.

(photo: Petrenko Andriy/ Shutterstock)

You can reach this post's author, Maria Guido, on twitter.
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  • Kate

    I think you’re taking the study’s focus a little hard. I take it as the authors focusing on the behavior that you can most easily do something about. Here’s a crazy idea, if you don’t want your kid to be a binge drinker, don’t be one yourself! Pretty easy to change.

    Regarding your comments about “minute samples of the population,” they sound quite like you need to brush up on your statistics training. Having a smaller sample size while reaching statistical significance actually can boost the generalizability of the results. Having an overpowered study is a bad thing because then you can’t be certain that your statistically significant findings aren’t idiosyncratic to that particular group of people.

  • jsterling93

    Oddly enough my mother never drank when I was growing up. Me on the other hand I enjoy a good drink. I don’t think the study is very accurate.

    • LinZoo

      The study says “the likelihood that they were “binge drinking” rose in line with how much they had thought, as a child, that their mother drank.” So if you aren’t binge drinking, you don’t disprove the findings of the study.

    • Mary

      I thought the same thing, not very accurate. Whenever I see a study, I’m usually one in the “minority”. Ever since I could remember, my mother was a raging alcoholic, still is. I rarely drink.

  • LinZoo

    The study says it was the child’s perception of how much mom drank, and not how much mom actually drank, that was correlated with the problem. So does that indicate that we can drink up, as long as we don’t talk about it or do it in front of the kids?

    • Andrea

      Kids are pretty perceptive. I don’t condone getting wasted in front of them, not drinking at all in front of them might create the impression that is a taboo thing and drive them to try the forbidden fruit.

    • ipsedixit010

      My parents took a very hardline approach to alcohol. My mom (and most of my mom’s family) doesn’t drink. My dad will have a few here and there. Alcohol wasn’t kept in our house. I didn’t see my dad drink until I was a senior in high school.

      That made it all the more tempting in college (I didn’t drink in high school; my sister did) and I didn’t know how to handle myself, when to cut myself off, etc. I would definitely say I was a binge drinker, although, at our school it was normal.

      Now, I enjoy a cocktail or a beer 1-2 times week. I’m not going to hide it from our son because I think it’s important for him to see responsible use of alcohol.