By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album
Reviewed by Larry Forthun, PhD, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida
In the fall, it’s a familiar weekend sight on just about every big college campus: cars and trucks packed into parking lots, with happy, excited fans eating, socializing, and getting ready for the big game. Tailgating is fun, and builds team and community spirit. But as anyone who’s been to one of these events knows, there’s another activity that’s also very popular at tailgates: drinking.
In fact, researchers have found that student drinking during tailgates is similar to drinking during well-known heavy-alcohol holidays, like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. However, tailgate parties do differ from these holidays in one possibly important way: unlike other campus festivities, tailgating is often a multigenerational family affair, with parents, grandparents, and other extended family gathering together for the occasion.
Does Parents’ Drinking Influence College Student Drinking?
Researchers writing in the Journal of Adolescence were curious about how parental drinking habits, including drinking during tailgate parties, might be linked to students’ own drinking. They asked a random group of about 500 undergraduates at a large university to estimate how many times per year their mothers and fathers drank more than 5 drinks in two hours (considered binge drinking) and how often their parents drank or got drunk at tailgates. They also asked the students how much they themselves tended to drink on a typical weekend, and had them complete a screening test that measures possible problems with alcohol.
Parental Alcohol Use: Sometimes Heavy
Students reported that about 42% of their parents tailgated, 38% drank while tailgating, and 20% got drunk while tailgating. And according to the young adults,half of their dads and about a quarter of their moms binge drank at least once in the past year. As for the students themselves, on average, they said they drank about 9 drinks on a typical weekend (quite a few!) and that they got drunk about twice a month.
Parents’ Tailgate Drinking: A Unique Effect?
As we might expect, when parents were heavy drinkers, their kids tended to also be heavy drinkers. However, parental drinking at tailgates had a unique effect in and of itself. Students who saw their parents getting drunk while tailgating drank more on weekends, got drunk more often, and experienced more negative consequences from drinking.
Although this study can’t prove that parental drunkenness at tailgate parties leads directly to college students drinking more, experts do believe that children tend to model their own drinking behavior after their parents’. In particular, seeing parents binge drink at these occasions may seem like an endorsement of heavy drinking on campus.
Tailgating is a lot of fun, but parents should keep in mind that their young college students are observing their behavior around alcohol. Parents can still enjoy these festive events without excessive alcohol use.
(Photo credit: world’s largest tailgate party by Joel Kramer. CC BY 2.0. Cropped.)
Further Reading
Tailgating Safe–from Gatorwell at UF
References:
Abar, C., Turrisi, R., & Abar, B. (2011). Brief report: Tailgating as a unique context for parental modeling on college student alcohol use. Journal of Adolescence, 34, 1103-1106. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2010.05.015
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