As parents, many of us worry about how to prepare our kids for the teenage years—especially when it comes to conversations around drugs and alcohol. In this week’s episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, I welcome two incredible guests from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Dr. Robert Turrisi, a professor and prevention researcher at Penn State University, and Catrina Clemens, MADD’s Vice President of Strategic Initiatives.

Here are the main points:

Preparing tweens for exposure to substances and guiding healthy decisions about alcohol.
Exploring different parenting approaches to teen alcohol use and engaging each group in prevention.
Understanding why delaying teen drinking as long as possible reduces long-term risks.
How early drinking and parental permission heighten risks due to developing teen brains.
Research showing no evidence that “teaching kids to drink safely” at home is protective.
Building open, judgment-free communication and safety plans for risky situations.
Helping teens feel safe calling parents for help when needed.
The importance of setting clear no-alcohol rules and delaying drinking to lower risk and strengthen influence.

If you’d like more resources on how to talk with your kids about alcohol and substance use, visit madd.org to access MADD’s Power of Parents guides, tools, and upcoming audiobook. You can also connect with Mothers Against Drunk Driving on social media for ongoing tips and inspiration, Facebook @MothersAgainstDrunkDriving, Instagram @maddnational, X (formerly Twitter) @MADDNational and Tiktok @maddnational

Remember, these conversations don’t have to be perfect—just ongoing, open, and filled with care. The more we talk, the more our kids learn to trust us and make safe choices.

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello, everybody. This is Doctor Laura Froyen and on this week's episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to be talking about a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently as my kids approached the teen years. I'm so excited to be bringing in two experts on helping children have really healthy relationships with substances and substance use. So we have Catrina Clemens and Dr. Robert Turrisi. They are experts and affiliated with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And so I'm so excited to have you guys on the show. Doctor Rob, why don't you go first. Tell me a little bit more about who you are and what you do, and then we'll have Catrina introduce herself too.

Robert: Sounds great. Well, first, thank you for having me on. So, I think right now, I'm not only talking with you and Catrina, but potentially thousands and thousands of parents. So I'm really excited to be here too, so thanks. I am a professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Health and the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University, at the main campus here. That State College, Pennsylvania. I've been here for 21 years, and I had previous stops at Boise State, as well as Sydney Albany. And, my career is really focused on trying to understand, what kind of risks that young people engage in, and what are the best practices to change that. And most of the stuff that I think about is, what's the least I could do to the largest number of people and have the biggest impact and we'll come back to that possibly, but that's my, that's my goal, the least amount of ask, the largest number of people and have the biggest impact.

Laura: Yeah, I really like that framing to be thinking about what is the smallest tweak I can make that will have the biggest ripple effect down the road. Yeah, I like that.

Robert: And that puts us in a unique place.

Laura: Yeah, I think it's really for parents, we often think we have to get it all right, that we have to be perfect, right? So even thinking about it from this place of, okay so what is just one thing? I'm going to mess up a lot, but what is the one thing I can really concentrate on getting, right? That will have a big effect. I really like that perspective a lot. Thank you. And Catrina, thank you for being here with us too.

Catrina: Thank you for having me. So I am Catrina. I am the vice president of strategic initiatives at Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I have the honor and privilege and pleasure of supporting the organization's mission at the organizational level. I've been with the organization for 12 years this year. And so we work with those who've been impacted by substance impaired driving crashes and then also work in the prevention space for those over the age of 21 and those under the age of 21 in support of the 21 minimum drinking age law, and that's where I get the distinct pleasure of working with Dr. Turrisi and other passionate colleagues who are just so dedicated to the life saving work that we do. And so it's definitely a pleasure to be here.

Laura: Wonderful. Okay, so I think the thing that I would love to start us talking about is as thinking about for a parent like me who's got kids who are almost 10 and 12, they're moving into the teen years. What do we need to be thinking about and looking, looking for, and thinking about how the conversations we need to be having, like, what are the things that should be on our radar when it comes to tweens who are moving into possibly being in spaces where they will be exposed to and experimenting with substances, particularly alcohol.

Robert: Catrina, do you want to go first or would you like me to jump in?

Catrina: I say, go ahead.

Robert: Okay. So, I'm gonna start by saying it's complicated. And then I'm gonna try and make it less complicated. Does that make sense? All right, because I think it's complicated. It really is. And I've been studying parenting behavior at the highest level since the 80s. So I have a lot of different generations, a lot of different families. We've, you know, we've been doing. Large clinical trials since early in this time period to examine this, right? And, and I think it's complicated. And part of the thing, I think it's complicated is we'd like to be able to say, hey, there's a child here and what can we do to make this child safe. But there's so many influences on this child's life, for example, parents. The community, the schools, other parents, their brothers and sisters, their cousins, TV, the internet. Phones, you know, there's so, it's, it, when you start thinking about the layers of influence, you know, it'd be great if we were back in some ways where there were rotary phones and phone booths, and one channel on the TV and, you know, cause it was a little easier, not easy, but easier to have some control over the influence. And now, there's a lot of different things. S

o that's what makes it complicated, right? So you have two parents and they could do the best jobs they could, or you could have 4 sets of parents because there's different types of families, and then there could be a lot of different brothers and sisters and so on. So, it starts by being complicated. That's why it's complicated. But there are things that we could do that are easy to understand, right? At different ages too, like, you know, most of the work that I've done has been with high schoolers and then students and college students and things like that. But I've worked with middle schoolers, but most of the work is centered around high schoolers and as they get older, there's much more. Abuse of alcohol consumption at that point. And there's differences between parents that think, well, it's okay if they go to parties, if there's just a level of supervision or in my house that we have rules about this. I live in that space. In fact, I was in the high school space early in my career, but then as a professor, I kept on having students in my classes that were having problems with alcohol and so. I realized there wasn't anything to do with that level, and so I got involved in that. So I kind of live in these different worlds that way, different developmental periods.

Laura: Can I ask you a question about, you know, are there specific kinds of camps that parents tend to fall into in terms of their beliefs around like, what is the right approach to alcohol with our kids? Like, I know. My husband and I, for example, grew up very differently. He grew up in a home where they kind of just ignored it, maybe assumed it was happening, but didn't talk about it and hoped for the best. I grew up in a home where one of my parents was highly controlling and highly concerned, and was very much of a, like, no, you should not ever drink ever, you know, like the, I grew up with in a we, so we grew up in two very different places, and I know that kids have different, you know, the parent that I'm speaking to right now have had different experiences, and I feel like I hear people talking about different strategies or the kind of the worldview that they're going to take in approaching this topic. And I'm kind of curious if your research has told you that, like, parents tend to fall into certain camps.

Robert: Well, so sometimes when, when we talk about this, I will say, well, here's what the science shows. Here's what the data show. It's really important for me to say that as opposed to here's what I think or feel, and we don't have data on that yet, so we don't really know, right? You know, one of the most famous developmental psychologists studied his own children and came up with an amazing theory about cognitive development and morality, and so on. Just studying his two kids, which I think is fascinating because if I tried to get a study funded or published, just studying my two kids, it would never happen. But it'd be fantastic if it did. So there's all these different types of parents and, and I, you know, for me, I'm, I've, when I say there's different types of parents, the science shows there are different types of parents. So I'll kind of say that sort of the common ones. There's one group of highly engaged parents. They're really, you know, they volunteer for things. They're there. They do a lot of they're they're there in school, they're there after school, they are highly super engaged, and they make up about 20% of parents that are out there.

Okay. So, if you need a volunteer, they're the volunteer. If you need to sell cookies, they're gonna help you sell the cookies. If you need to get somebody to chaperone a trip, they're gonna chaperone the trip. 20% of them are like that. And then there's 20% that are exactly like that, except they have multiple kids, so they're dealing with multiple kids probably. And they have parents, and their parents might be at different levels of health, physically or mentally. And so they're dealing with that too. And then they're dealing with other elements of their families, like a sister or brother that have kids and whatnot. And then they might also have a job, and so they're thinking about their job versus their home versus their kids versus the things. And in essence, they're putting out a lot of fires all the time. They're dealing with everybody's mental health and physical health, and then all the things are gone. So when things align right, they're like that first group, highly engaged, but they sometimes can't be as highly engaged as they'd like to. Despite the fact that that may sound like it describes everybody, it describes again about 20%. And then, so that, that, that what it's saying is that we have, we have a possibility of having 40% or 4 out of 10 parents being super engaged parents.

Then there's a group of parents who are not quite as engaged as those other two groups, and they make up roughly 20% also. And, but the reason why they're not as engaged is they're not having the same problems everybody's having. So you get together with your friends and you say, how are your kids? What's going on? What's that? And they just don't have a lot to offer other than their kids are always getting into MIE's preschooler program, and, you know, they're off to Stanford for summer camp and science and, you know, like, they're just they live the TV ideal life, right? And, and that's, that's their group. So they might not be as engaged with substance abuse issues because they're not experiencing it in their homes.

And then there's a group of people who are, you know, they're complicated because they're not really engaged and they might have a lot of problems going on and they might be the problem but not recognize it. And, that group doesn't quite make up 20% but they're in the mix. It's almost like if you wanna, the kids wanna have a party on a weekend, they don't want to know the parents, their parents know about it, they're going over that parent's house, okay, and everybody knows who those parents are. And then there's another group that just changes a lot, and they're small. But that's what the data show. So if I do an intervention and I say, let's do this brief intervention. I know 20% are gonna be at the door, ringing the bell. They're, they're stepping through the door. That next group wants to, so if I make it difficult, they're not gonna be able to do it, but if I make it easier, then they're gonna do it, which comes back to the, I want to do the least amount. They're gonna be engaging because I'm not asking that they come to school and they give me.

Laura: You're lowering the barrier for entry, yeah.

Robert: So, that's where I'm at now. I'm working at roughly 40%. And then I have this other 20% who are like, it's not their problem, but they might recognize it's the problem in the community and they might have a community heart, so they might come with me or not, so I could get up to that 60%. Then there's that other group that everybody has difficulty reaching. Because they're not gonna be as engaged. They're gonna have different views on how this works. And the reality is a lot of the stuff that we do is we try and take what we learn scientifically in these clinical trials and then put it as a former colleague would say in kitchen table language, so it's usable by everybody. And I really love that term, that it's like you could talk around the kitchen table about this. And so we take the science element, we make it easily digestible so everybody can have it and, and try not to pass judgment on people that don't like science. We try to meet them where they are and say, here are some things that you can consider doing. And we're reaching everybody who tries for that last group, but that last group's most difficult. So we've done some studies to say how we get them. How do we get them and we never get the whole portion of those people, but we, we learned that, you know, if we ask them to come to schools, they're not coming.

Even if we have dinners and you know, haircuts or whatever, they're not coming. If we give them a book to read, a booklet to read, it's short, it's gonna be a real challenge to get them to do that. But if you give them a simple pamphlet. Like one page. They'll look at it. And, the cool thing about that is that once they look at it, they realize that, well, maybe then they'll look at the booklet, and then if the booklet and the things happens and it opens up the door that was closed before. And this idea of the least amount. So, one of the things that I really love about some of the stuff that we've done together with that. As we've done this, we've created small pamphlets and they're based on the science to be able to engage people that are difficult to reach, and it's and that's what you talked about, Laura, about breaking the barrier down. You know, we said, what if we just give you one thing to look at? Would you look at that? And they're like, well.

Laura: So what are they, what is on the pamphlet? Like, so if I were, if we were holding the pamphlet, what would be those like take home points or the piece that really kind of wakes you up? Like what are the things?

Robert: No, definitely not.

Laura: I'm not, I don't have it, you know what, what, what we did.

Robert: We took the sections of the booklet that's been highly effective, that's been tested on a national audience and shown the strong effects, and we took sections of that and made them pamphlets. So we had to take, but, you know, in clinical terms, we had to take the dosage and reduce it to what we put on a page and make it look good. And this is one of the beautiful parts about working with mad people because they're in the field. Everywhere in this country, and this is, I know this isn't a true statement, but I'll say it anyway. There's somebody that's connected to men in every county, in every state in the country for the most part. And, I know this because I travel all around, and then I say, do you work with men? They're like, Oh, you should meet, you know, or I go to do a, a talk, and they're like, Oh, I love your work, and, and it's, it's con it's a constant. And I've been to Alaska, I've been, I've been to not only the 48, but I've been outside the 48 and, and done this. And so, they're out there.

So in other words, we have this wonderful group of people who are professionals and amazing at that, that can give us feedback on what this should look like. We can take the science and say, here it is, and then they can make it better because it makes it more digestible for everybody. And so I'll come back and say, no, no, we need to do this. And then they'll probably have a really cool idea. Let's do this. And I was like, All right, let's do that. And so that the end product is really a collaboration. Of, a lot of different views, that make it work. So you want to know what's in it. Well, I was thinking maybe even Catrina for at least the 2nd 15 minutes. I might have skipped over in terms of the parents.

Laura: I think one of the, one of the beautiful aspects of the relationship that Dr. Turrisi and his team and Matt have been able to form going back to that kitchen table talk piece is, you know, universally speaking, what I really love about Dr. Turrisi’s approach is that every parent has a positive intention for their child, right? They're, they're doing their action from a place of protection and safety. It just isn't necessarily always grounded in what the research tells us is actually effective, and that's the way he's able to, in partnership with Matt and through the Power of Parents program, really break that down into a way that's nonjudgmental. That doesn't come across preachy. That's really there to say, let's talk about parenting styles.

Let's talk about how you show up, and then let's talk about what the research shows because your intention is genuine. Your intention is meant to create safety for your child. Your approach just may not be proven to be effective. And let me explain why. And Dr. Turrisi does a beautiful job in that conversation with those parents in helping them flow through. I see now into his point of being able to read a pamphlet and then buying into the investment of reading into the booklet, then they change the way they parent on the heels of consuming this information and educating themselves on what that looks like and what does it mean to really be having a preparatory conversation with your child. And preparing them based on what the research shows us to be effective.

Robert: So, here's a big topic, right? Should I allow my older teens to at least have a drink on a special occasion, right, when family functions or holidays or, you know, are they gonna be the only kid that's not allowed to go to the party.

Laura: So, Doctor Turrisi, I just want to let you know, so I'm in the state of Wisconsin. And it is legal for 16 year olds to drink with their parents at establishments. So at a bar or a restaurant. That's the environment that I'm in.

Robert: Yeah, and that law kind of changes a little bit. So when I started it, it was universal across all 50 states. And then, I don't want to disagree because I don't know all laws in all states, but the law, to my knowledge, at least the federal law. Right? And this is where the state laws and the federal laws could be at odds. It's not legal for somebody under 21 to purchase alcohol in all 50 states. It's not legal, again, I think this is from the federal government, I could be corrected on this, for young adults or young older adolescents to drink in a public establishment. That doesn't mean it's enforced and it might be culturally different in different places, but it's not, but it's also in even their homes, it varies from state to state and county to county as to whether or not I'm allowed to serve my underage person a drink at a special. But to my knowledge, my last checking on the date and I could be wrong, that it's illegal for somebody underage to drink at a public establishment, no matter where. And again, there could be a state or a community law that goes against that.

For example, there was a period of time, I think, where it was 55 was the highest speed limit, but I lived in Idaho, and I think in Idaho you could drive 65 or 75 on someone. Wyoming, I think, was like that as well. So I think that there's, there's, there's, there's definitely different layers of laws. But either way, despite laws, I think that's laws are there to help protect the public, right? And so, you know, there are times where you got to get someplace, right? And it's important, like somebody's gonna give birth or, you know, your kids are gonna be left alone and, you know, say, go over the speed limit, and I think the same thing is that we have adults making decisions based upon their welfare of their family. And I grew up in a home where my parents didn't drink a lot. Right. But that was what my observation was because I went to bed at 8 o'clock or 7:30, you know, and when I go visit my aunts and uncles and my cousins, that was, they, we, they used to have wine at lunch, and they'd say, Robbie, would you like a glass of wine? And I think, I forgot what age I was when they would offer it to me because it was normal in their house.

Coming from the the culture and so on. So I think that stuffs that stuffs totally exists here. So what is the right age and what should a parent do, right? And, I wanna say, up until a few years back, and a few years for me, it could be 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but, but it's not, it's recent, right? It's not 40 or 50 years ago. We didn't have data. So some people were like, hey, look, I'm gonna let my kids drink it, you know, if they're old enough to be in the army or, you know, blah blah, whatever the whatever the perceived value is, they're gonna reinforce rules and, and allow this to happen. We didn't have any data, so it was like, well, you know, you get to do what you get to do, right? You're the, you're the parent, you're in charge, right? And, by the way, parents get to do what they want to do anyway, like how, whether they should go to the doctor or not, whether they should, what they should eat and, you know, everything, right? Parents have a lot of say in that. But this idea is about what's right. It's really a, you know, I wanna say that it's a family-based decision, but we have science now, what's the greatest risk, right? And so, my knowledge of mad, and Catrina, correct me if I'm wrong, was it sort of started in the mid 80s. 1988. Yeah, 1980. And the reason is because there wasn't a lot of literature on some of the things I was doing, so I was canvassing newsprint.

And I heard about Candy Leitner and work that she was trying to do, and I was early in my career at this point in time. And like some of the things that she was doing, I thought it was flat out amazing. I still do, but by the way, I still think it's amazing because I think you can get data to try to find the most successful grassroots organization in the country, and first place is an easy one, and then second place is far away, and that's first place. Because they touch homes, they touch courts, they touch police, they touch schools, they touch, they have the, they, they've got the, and it started there. With candy, it's one thing when people think, 01 person can't really make a difference one person made a major difference. Yeah, it's stunning. Like, you know, I don't, I have to say I'm not sure I know anyone else that's had that big of an impact, and so that's pretty cool, right? And I always thought, oh, I'd love to meet her if that ever happened, and I'd love to get a chance to do something if that ever happened. And little did I know, like 15, 20 years later, we'd be working together. But, but still, the point is, Mothers Against Drunk Driving was like the first organization that formally said no alcohol if you're underage. And we didn't really have a lot of data on it. That was the position.

And over the years, the, the idea of like, well, what is the right amount, because even though the no alcohol rule was put in effect for people, it may be communicated, and some parents believe in that rule and other parents don't, you know, they're like, well, you know, I drank when I was 18. Well, 18 was the age when I was growing up. It seems about right, you know, and so on. So, so there's always this age. What's the right age? By the way, he knows how I'm not telling anybody what the right age is. Well, we are on the edge of our seats over here. I mean, I'll get into the clinical side now, right? We do know that the earlier that somebody initiates alcohol use. That they have a much higher chance of having a lifetime alcohol problem. It's not even, it's very hot. It's like 30 to 40% of people that, that, you know. 15 or 16 or younger. Are are almost 1 in 2, not quite, but 1 in 2. We'll have a, that's a lot, right? by the way, we're on a podcast. I get to see everybody's face and I just watch Laurie go, oh my God, kind of. I mean, so, so that's what we do know. That's science and here it's not science that was collected in the small town or the small this or the small that. This is a national level. Really high quality data that is collected in multiple places and converged so that we start looking and going, okay, it's not just the Michigan, the Michigan study that's done this has been going on for, for decades. And it's also CDC and it's also NIH and, you know, you start seeing this convergence, you know, okay, that's must be it. There's no data that shows it's not. That light. So, so if you wanted to pick something to do as a parent, delay initiation. Simple thing, postpone it for as long as possible. So if you let your kids have a drink at 13, you are in the world of that.

You let your kids have a drink at 15, you're in the world of that. If you let your kids drink at 18, you're not in that same world, and you could shrink at 19. You're not in that same world. And the closer you get to 21, the more the numbers go really down. So when I said to you, if I could go back, we did this before we started, what kind of parent would I be before? Fortunately for me, I was doing this research when I was raising my kids. And so we never let them have a drink before they're 21, not because we're the super uber conservative parents that never let our kids do anything. The data was right in front of us. If we let them have a drink of alcohol, we'd be contributing to the possibility, a high possibility, not a low possibility of them having lifetime alcohol problems. So I wanna be a good parent. I don't wanna hurt. Avoid it. And I keep using my sons as examples of things, but these are, I had one of my, one of my children when he was really young. He said, do you think we'll ever have a beer together? Before I'm 21. And I said to him, you know, if I didn't know what I know, I'd say it's probably fairly high. But knowing what I know, I'd be a bad parent if I let you have this drink because I'd be increasing your chances of having a lifetime alcohol problem. That's not a small thing, you know, it was a matter of him just having a hangover once in college. I might have given him a beer, but putting him in a position of having this lifetime.

And when I could talk about what that is, you ask, but having that first life, why would I do that to him? But I knew that, and a lot of parents may not be aware of that, that those numbers exist, but I live in this world, so I know it. So for me, it was easy to say, And so I, you know, I said, but here's the thing, we talk all the time. So here, I want you to think about how us having a beer together would change our relationship. I really want you to think about that. I'm gonna give you about a week, and then I want you to come back to me and tell me. What it is and how it is made, and if you can make a good argument, I buy the first round. And a week passed and we didn't have that conversation. Two weeks went by, and we didn't have a final. At some point I said, by the way, do you want to revisit this? Have you thought about this? He's like, yeah, I couldn't come up with any reason how it would make a relationship any better.

Laura: I really love that question. How would it, how would it make our relationship, I mean.

Robert: That holding something from you, yeah, is this gonna be a barrier in, in going forward? And so I wanna know. By the way, I'm not sure I would want to drink for him anyway.

Laura: But no, yeah, I mean, the question in general, I mean, thinking just extrapolating this to bigger questions, are our kids have all of these influences coming, you know, bombarding them from other sources, and then when they ask us for things that are outside of our family's core values and our moral codes or whatever. Being curious about what would that bring to our relationship or what would that bring to your life, how would it make it better, and giving them time to think about that and really like to bring it. You know, some discernment, teaching them that discernment skill, it's beautiful. I love that question, just for a variety of situations.

Robert: Yeah. And by the way, I, that I, that start, the question started with, can you tell me what?

Laura: Yeah, can you tell me what?

Robert: A what, right? Not yes or no, but what. And one of the things that we've integrated into the mad materials is parents starting questions with what, how, why. So that engages conversation as opposed to, you know, grunts or just know and things like that. Because that's what we do in our clinical work. And then we ask people, tell me about what this does to when this happens. Tell me how this affects you when this occurs and stuff like that. Why, why would you do this as opposed to that? And so that, that, it's funny, I didn't intentionally. Use that question, but because I do it, it rolled off. All right, tell me how this would, how, how this would change our relationship in a positive way. Welcome back.

Catrina: A really good question that I hear come up quite a bit or another comment that I hear come up quite a bit from parents is the sentiment of wanting to demystify, right, alcohol, right, to teach a child, someone younger, how to drink.

Laura: This is exactly what I was gonna bring up because I think that the statistics that Rob just shared go against a common logic, and maybe as a, you know, a fallacy too, that if we, they do it in my home where they're safe and they experience, how it feels, they will become better able to handle it when they go out into the world, or, you know, that like that's the common narrative. I feel really curious, Catrina, what you were about to say about that.

Catrina: Yeah, and our research shows that that's not the case. What it does is those individuals end up going out and drinking more heavily and more frequently outside of the supervision of their parents. And because their brain isn't fully developed, judgment isn't in place, right? Kids don't drink the same way adults drink, so it is dangerous drinking. It is going to have more negative consequences and outcomes, right? The more positive association you give with underage drinking. The more the fallacy builds, that's never going to happen to me, right? The more positive interactions, they're already built with a fallacy. That's their developmental stage, right? They're invincible. That's a part of the thing. So you're the unintentional outcome of what is meant to be a positive intention is positively reinforcing a negative outcome, and Doctor Teresa can obviously share.

Laura: Yeah, I'm really curious about the mechanism, the mechanism behind that and what kind of what you, you as the researcher, feel is driving that.

Robert: I am such a proud scientist right now because Catrina's like my best student at this moment, because she just rattled off all the science that I've been sharing with her for years on this. So here's the thing. So, remember when I said it's complicated, different homes, different rules, different supervision, right? Different rules, different parents, different monitoring, right? Well, so you know, we've learned. Over the past couple of decades, the brains are continuing to develop kind of early, at least into the early to mid-twenties if not later, right? And the biggest form of development that goes on to that point before and after is being more emotional in the way we do things and make choices and you know, information versus being more thoughtful and more intentional. So, for example, I, you know, I don't want to overgeneralize, but if you ask a younger person about what they want to do on a specific weekend, they'll tell you how they feel about it. And because the feeling is an emotion, the emotion tends to be in the lower part of our brain, so it's developed earlier, we tend to, you know, you see kids go, I want that, you know, whatever, you know, so I started this by asking about the ages of your kids.

Your kids are mostly emotional in the way they make choices. It feels good, it feels bad. I wanna do this, I don't wanna do that. And that's, you know, that's who they are. Yeah. Well, the frontal cortex, the big part of their brain, the one that involves memory and decision making, and judgment, and processing speed, and all that kind of stuff. That's the stuff that comes in later. So there's good science behind when young people make the choices, they make choices based upon what they're mostly willing to do, willing being an emotional thing. I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to do that. It's surprising how, when you think about risk, willingness comes out a thing. So one of the things that we've been trying to do is we've been trying to get kids not to get in a car with somebody who's been drinking, right? Not only, you know, do we want to stop people from drinking and, and driving, but we do want to avoid this. And I don't have the data in front of me, but it's, it's not positive in terms of how many, how many younger teams.

We'll get in a car with somebody who's been trucking solder or their same age and it was part of our study and that's been part of the materials that we've been working on together, which is really getting kids not to do that. And kids will have different reasons for why they will do that. Right? And so one of the reasons that they'll do that is they'll know it's wrong and they know it's horrible. But they don't want to leave a friend alone. So they'll just get in the car to make sure that friend's being taken care of. So if friends have been drinking and they're not capable of making good choices, that other friend that's been responsible who might not have been drinking at all might get in that car so protected. So they're doing something positive, even though they're both at great risk, right? And, you know, a lot of times we'll go to a team and we'll say, why did you do that? Right? Why, why we ask the why question, why? Why did you do that? We want to have a good reason. I don't know.

Laura: I often find that questions are not super helpful for kids, because they often don't know why. They, because it was an emotional decision as opposed to a logical one.

Robert: So, but, but still, we do ask that, right? You know, because we think that way, like, give me the reasons so that we can talk about this.

Laura: And even shifting that question to tell me what was going through your mind as you made the choice to get in the car, gets you to different information then why did you do that, right?

Robert: So, I'm gonna interrupt this for a second. I have a lawn service that's coming to my house. You won't hear them because of zoom filters, but they're gonna be really loud on the other side of my office. So if I get distracted, that's, that's what, we are, we have people going on that side. All right, so with that in mind. So getting back to the age and the kids and so on. The thing is that when you're at home and you're being supervised by your parents, you're at home and being supervised by your parents. In a lot of ways, they're making the decisions about what's safe and what's not. Right? And so they're older, they're using both parts of their brain, how they feel, but thought process and judgments, things like that. And younger people don't have that. And when they're with their friends, now they're with 15 or 20 people that are all making emotional decisions so they can kind of multiply the risk factors that way.

The colleges and universities, you know, I kind of tongue in cheek joke when I talk to parents, I said, they're about to have 45,000 new friends. You know, because they're going to the school with 450, 50,000 students at it, and they're all between the ages of 18 and 22. And so they're all mostly doing things based upon how they feel. And they're very influenced by that. And the environment's so strong. So when I talk to my kid and, and say, you know, when this happens, what would you do? There's, there's zippo pressure. And when they're around, you know, 45, 50,000 of their new people that have the same rules applied, it's not gonna be the same rules as in their parents' home with all adults making those choices. So it seems counterintuitive to think if I give them a little bit of alcohol in a controlled environment, they're gonna take the mystery away, and they're gonna make better choices later. I mean, it makes sense, by the way. I can't criticize them from that standpoint. It just doesn't map on to the data that when they're with their friends, you know, I mean, you know, the, in the town I live in, we have about 150,000 young people every weekend, even though we have 45 students, they have several, each have several friends come and visit.

And so on Friday and Saturday nights after 8 o'clock. The town is mostly filled with younger adults that are making emotional decisions rather than thinking things through. Now comes Monday, they're gonna be smart people and they're gonna make a lot of good choices Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and all that kind of stuff because the environment is a little different. It comes Friday, Saturday. It's gonna go back to the higher risk environment where the only adults that are out there are the ones that are serving them. And restaurants and bars and so I mean I go downtown where I live and then when I visit other places just to see what that's like and it's, it's completely different than So it's a completely different environment. So, the idea of this small amount, study after study after study after study after study done here in the US. In Europe, in Australia, which is very common to the cultures that we live here in the US, shows that when parents provide the alcohol to them, even with good intentions, those kids are at higher risk and they experience, they tend to drink more often, which is what Catrina said, they tend to drink in larger amounts when they do consume alcohol.

And no surprise, they experience more consequences. And what we, what we've seen is, whatever that number of drinks that they typically drink, and you can't see this on podcast, but I'm waving my hands like it's a waterline. What that high water mark for the consumption that exists early in their experience in college usually stays that way. We don't see a lot of maturing now. Well, we don't see it. It's just that among the people who are drinkers and not casual experimental drinkers, they usually stay at the same amount. And so, if you develop an alcohol problem early, it's not gonna go away for 4 years of college without treatment. I come to college, if you come to college, this drinking pattern of behavior, it's not gonna go down usually. So when they start earlier, the earlier initiation, they're more likely to keep that pattern. And it's, and what we've seen is everybody goes up. So people that were like, I only drink once in a while and I limit it to one or two drinks when they leave high school and they go on to college, that number's gonna go up.

They're gonna drink on weekends. The people who drink heavily on weekends in high school are gonna drink heavier on, and, and then other days, like Tuesdays, dark days, whatever, you know, pick your poison kind of thing. And the people who drank, you know, heavy, they're gonna start, you're gonna start seeing signs and symptoms of a clinical alcohol problem. Okay. So when I say an alcohol problem. What I'm trying to say here is that we used to call it alcoholism, right? That's what people refer to like my, my grandfather's an alcoholic. My, this was an alcoholic. I knew an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic, whatever it is. We don't really refer to that anymore. We call it an alcohol use disorder, but that's not really a kitchen language thing. So a nice way to frame that is to say they have an alcohol problem. And usually what goes with that, and I'm, I'm really narrowing this issue, but an alcohol problem is when people tend to drink more than they plan to. So they wanna go out and have a beer, but then they're gonna cut themselves off, they have something to do the next day. They go over that consistently. They have difficulty controlling or stopping drinking. So oftentimes when they drink, they'll drink till they pass out. They'll develop a tolerance for alcohol, and a lot of people think, oh, tolerance, that's great, you don't get sick anymore.

Well, experience all the negative things. However, you need more alcohol in your system to feel the positive things. So, if I'm with someone with tolerance, I might stop at my second beer, but that person's not gonna stop at the 2nd. They're chasing to feel the good effects of alcohol, and they might have to drink 10 or 11 beers to feel anything, right? So there's gonna be this and and and then they're gonna, they're gonna have to continue to drink during the day or they'll go into withdrawal. So, for example, if I have an 11 o'clock lunch, because it's an early lunch, I'm probably having Sprite. They're gonna have to have their first drink or their first drink publicly and then it might be a late afternoon drink and then so on because they need to consume alcohol and go into withdrawal. So that's what we have. Do you mind if I share one more thing? I know you probably have a lot of questions about this.

Laura: No, I'm, I'm loving what you're saying.

Robert: Doctor Kimberly Mallet, she's an exceptional, clinical psychologist, and she is also a private, she's a Penn State faculty member, she's a private practice, and then she writes a web blog, I'm not advertising for, I'm just talking about who she is called Mental Tunne-ups. And they're about to get short pieces of information that can go a long way. She's been studying problems that young people have and the consequences they have around this. And a lot of her work and I worked with her very closely, has been focused on looking at seniors in college. All right. And who has alcohol problems? And can I play a little game here? Guess the percentage or the number of seniors who are drinkers that are clinically could be clinically diagnosed as having alcohol use disorder. Seniors, so add it, add 10 seniors or 100 seniors, what's the number you think are leaving college with an alcohol problem.

Laura: 75%?

Robert: 75% it's pretty high.

Laura: Okay. I don't know.

Robert: I mean, that's, that's like 7 to 8 out of 10 are leaving college with a clinical out.

Laura: I mean, giving what I guess given the markers that you just listed as.

Robert: That was the problem. I think a lot more grant money to study this because there'd be, it'd be really bad, but that's fair, okay. You know, do you know the number for me? Or do you know the number?

Laura: I feel like maybe it was like 60%.

Robert: Well, that's pretty high. Both are pretty high. But, but ready, the number I'm gonna give you is really high too. It's about 1 in 5, about 20%. Wow, 1 in 5. Now, let's talk about this for a second. If 1 in 5 graduating seniors who drink has an alcohol problem, and you then multiply that across all the universities and colleges in the country. And you do that for 2 years or 3 years. The number is equal to the size of the cities of Atlanta. San Francisco, Denver, Boston. So if you think about the number of people who live in those cities, they don't have an alcoholic disorder. That's every 3 years, okay?

It's a big number, and the estimates vary depending upon the studies that have been done, but a single outpost disorder costs each American roughly a million dollars in terms of tax costs and lost wages and injuries and lifetime treatment and a million dollars. So it's a lot of a million dollars, right? So one of the reasons why we're focusing on this, we're trying to disrupt that, trying to leave you or seniors with an alcohol problem that they're not gonna probably get treatment for maybe until they're in their 30s and they've lost multiple jobs, multiple relationships, who knows, right? So this idea of early initiation, getting back to it, is one of the key factors. The second one that's a key factor there is having parents that like to drink.

Laura: Okay, so early initiation, parents that let them drink, are there other ones?

Robert: Yeah, but those are two big ones.

Laura: 2 big ones, those ones.

Robert: And again, we get it when we say, oh, if you start drinking earlier, you're at greater risk, right? But we don't think about it from the standpoint of parents that have really good intentions.

Laura: Absolutely.

Robert: Kids, what they're doing is inconsistent with what we know to be safe behaviors. We published a paper in 2019 showing because we tracked parents and their kids throughout all of college. And the kids who drank more, who had parents that let them earlier in high school. Those kids had more consequences and drank more and did all that in their first year, and by the time they reached their senior year, those numbers doubled or tripled.

Laura: Wow. Yeah, that's how I felt. So it's a compounding problem. Well, it doesn't get right, exactly. Can I ask that?

Robert: Oh, so for me what the wow you said, I thought two things when, when we did this work. The first was, that's a big impact of just letting your kids drink in a controlled setting at home. The second thing I thought is, these kids are probably gonna be the kids that raise the next kids and let them drink at home.

Laura: Yeah, and it's a multigenerational thing too, yeah.

Robert: Yeah, so we decided we would try and attack that head on and go to parents who let their kids drink small amounts do something brief, something easy, something small. To see if they change. Won't get into the details of the intervention, but 93% of the parents let their kids' drink change.

Laura: Wow. What is the name of the intervention?

Robert: Pea okay, yeah, communicate and it was developed in large part by Kim Mallet and based on some of the other work that she had been doing with physicians, but it was really easy and really brief. I mean, we talked to parents on the average of 10 to 12 minutes and we raised this issue in the context of intervention. And the first thing I did was when we developed it as I went out to Med and said, can you give me access to parents that not just work at Med but in your building during lunchtime, can I just talk to them and, and pilot it and, and did. And I came back and said to him, I think we have something.

Laura: Okay, so I'm thinking about the parents who are listening here who definitely want that intervention, right? So they, they want to, you know, parents who are listening to parenting podcasts want to do better, right? They want to protect their kids. They want to keep them safe. I think that they were likely very hungry for an opportunity to learn those things that can have a profound impact, you know, that they can do on a small level, that can have a profound impact on their kids. Is there a way for them to access that?

Robert: The easiest? Well, they don't need the intervention, by the way, in this case. They really don't. We tried the intervention because we want to know. If we try to get parents who thought it was a healthy, safe thing to give their kids apples, would they be willing?

Laura: To change that perception.

Robert: I think if they were told directly, here's the issue, here's the data you need to change. Some of the parents would say, oh yeah, I do, but others would push back and probably say things like, and I know this because I did the interventions. Not my kid. My kid's not gonna be like that. The way we parent, this won't happen. And maybe they're right. Maybe they're the anomaly. Maybe they're the one, the needle in a haystack. The data doesn't seem to show that. That paper that I told you about, the 2019 paper published, showed that it went up 2 to 3 times in the first year, 3 times, 3 times more in the third and fourth year. We were really curious about this, so, and there was some discussion among some of the scientists on you know, maybe it's the drinking, maybe it's a sample, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, like all the, all the things that come up. So, we not only continued to do the work, but we also looked at, let's find one. Well done study that shows the benefits of giving your kid a small amount in a controlled setting. Like, in other words, if parents are doing this successfully, let's find that tool to be able to share that with parents, right?

And we couldn't find a single study done anywhere in the US or anywhere else, Europe or Australia, that showed the positive effect of this. And we tried, we even tried to do it ourselves because we're like there's something that's happening. We want to share that, right? Like, I'm not gonna say, oh, I don't believe in letting your kids drink, so therefore, I'm, I'm not gonna share that information. I'm gonna share that as far as I could possibly go. We couldn't find a single study, and we couldn't find it in our own studies. That's not to say it doesn't exist for some unique family out there, but I can't tell you what it is. It's not like I'm, I'm, you know, a dummy or an idiot. I really try hard. It just, I just don't exist. I say that I remember getting interviewed for a very popular nationally delivered magazine, and I won't call them out. And I was sharing this information with the writer. And she said, well, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this topic. And I said, well, you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with literally every study that's ever been done that we have out there. You have no basis for it, you know, I don't know what to say to you.

Laura: I mean, it is hard when our beliefs are challenged, right? When we're confronted with a deeply held belief and are asked to shift and change. That is hard. So I, I just, I do want to make sure that our listeners are able to find the resources that are grounded in Rob's research and provided so beautifully through MADD. Where can we go? Where can parents go to learn more or go through a program?

Catrina: Sure, yeah. So, they can go to www.madmadd.org.org/poweroparents, and all of our materials are virtually there. We're actually in the process of working on an audiobook format of this document as well, and it just recently has gone under review with Doctor Treacy and his team. And to update in the most recent research, including cannabis and other drugs, and I think some tangible things that they'll find there to really dig into and lean into are, you know, engaging with their kids in frequent and ongoing conversations early and often, and not just when things are, are at the height, right? This is about continuingly engaging around discussion forums and using that open-ended discussion format that Dr. Turrisi mentioned. To really set some ground rules around consequences that are related to alcohol and other drugs for them and their family and what those rules look like and to never allow underage drinking and or other drug use in their presence or under, you know, condoning that from other parents and their networks.

And then to be cognizant to your, to your point earlier, Laura, around hosting safe gatherings and making sure that they're never providing alcohol or other drugs to anyone under the age of 21, and parental modeling, understanding that their kids watch them and the way in which they operate and behave dictates a norm and so making sure that they're aware of what that looks like and you know, when we start to talk about alcohol and other drugs, to be really intentional about making sure those are secure and out of reach and that you're paying attention to what that looks like in your home, you know, those are some tangible ways in which parents can kind of show up and be present in that conversation as they move forward, regardless of their age and their parenting style.

Laura: Beautiful. Can I ask you two questions, both of you guys, for just that are personal questions. So one is I want my kids to be able to call me and trust that I will get them into a safe place. And I know that that can be really hard for kids because they're afraid of getting in trouble, they're afraid of getting their peers in trouble, all of those things. Do you have any recommendations for the parents who want to be that person who will protect them, keep their kids safe, but also not scare them into making poor decisions?

Catrina: So that's actually something we cover in our power of youth programs. So this is the program that we get to middle school and high school students, and a part of that is having a plan, an intentional conversation with their parents and or trusted adult, that if they find themselves in a situation. And that maybe they didn't intend to be in that at the end of the day, safety is the most important part, getting home safe, and they deserve to get home safe. So what does that look like? How do they find themselves a way out of that situation to Dr. Turrisi’s point earlier, to never write with someone who's been consuming alcohol or drugs and to know what's my plan. And does that mean I'm going to use my parents as an excuse to get out of this tricky situation because I'm going to call and say, Hey, I left my sweatshirt in your car.

Something that's a code language that tells the parent, I need you to come pick me up right now and not make a big deal out of it, you know, a safe word, emoji, whatever that might look like, that's a trusted relationship between the parent and their child is an important part of that safety plan. That even when a child could be doing all the right things, they go to an outing and they're not drinking or using other drugs, but they had no idea it was going to be there, and they show up and the situation gets out of hand, right, because any time alcohol and other drugs and illegal substances are in the hands of those that shouldn't have them, things can get out of control. It's unpredictable. So what is the plan and what is the open dialogue for the parent and the child to have that and set those expectations on the front end instead of in response to, knowing that the most important thing is that they get home safe.

Laura: Beautiful. I really love Catrina, that you're being so clear on making a very well articulated plan. I think for me growing up, I had the vague idea, like my mom's, you can always call me and I'll come and get you no questions asked. We didn't have very specific ideas of when, like when to use that call, like what does that mean for my peers, like what, you know, how like how to do it, you know. I love that invitation to be super specific and make a plan with your kiddos. I'm also, I'm thinking about in these conversations that we're having with our kids, does your program offer advice for parents who maybe have their own checkered past with substance, or who, you know, had a kind of normal statistically normal relationship with alcohol through college and how we go about sharing some of our experiences? Do we not share our experiences? And what is the recommendation there?

Catrina: Yeah, I say our program is very much about open and honest dialogue, right? It's not necessarily rehashing, you know, personal sentiments and memories, right, that are in a flippant way, right? But it's meant to be honest and to the point that Dr. Turrisii made earlier, we didn't know what we know now, right? The 201 minimum drinking age law came into effect in the 90s and that was inspired by so much of the research and information that we learned, not to mention. The huge amount of underage drinking fatalities that we saw as an impact on the outset of that, right? The 21 minimum drinking age law is, you know, potentially the most researched law that has been the most life saving when it comes to it, it has an average of saving about 100 lives a year. So that's almost 25,000 lives cumulative since it's been passed. So there's research and science that tells us why we do this, and that may not have been available to them when they were their age. And likely they probably have anecdotal experiences that say I might not have put myself in that situation had I known, or had I not. Right. And so, you know, being able to understand and meet their child where they're at in an authentic and, and genuine way is a connection point within itself without feeling guilty that you're imposing a different philosophy because you know, you know, when we know different, we do different, right? And so, it's being able to, you know, live in that experience and know, you want more and better for your child than what you had.

Laura: Beautifully put.

Robert: Yeah. So your two questions. The first question was a while ago. Can you repeat it?

Laura: Oh yeah, so, I was, I was just kind of wondering how we can go about making sure we're the parent that our kids can come to when they need to get out of a sticky situation.

Robert: So there was a former person at Med, an employee and I was having a conversation with her. She was a senior level administrator. And her kids were a little older than mine. And she told me that as a birthday present, she gave them an Uber app. Where they can just use the Uber app to get home. And I thought it was great. And I said, can I steal that? Yes, I did, by the way, and I gave both my kids Uber apps. And part of the reason I did that is because even though, you know, I knew that we had a lot of communications about this, there's always that one time that your brain hurts happens, you know, there's, and I don't want that to be a time that either they regret because they harm somebody or they like, you know, we're talking about them in the past tense. So I gave them both this Uber app, and one of them was living in Boston, where the public transportation kind of stops at around 11 o'clock at night. And so, he made use of the Uber app, and I thought that was great.

Not a lot of it, but he used it, right? And he would say things like, I'm gonna use the Uber app because I'm going out like that. I was like, all right, great, because I'd say, what's going on? It's your weekend. The other person, my other son, I got like an Uber bill my first month of the Uber app. It was like $250. And I, I was like, we need to talk about this, you know, using this Uber app a lot. He's like, well, I'm not really using it for me. I'm using it so that people I know don't drive drunk or get in a car with another driver. And I was like, wow, that's really good. And, you know, and he lived in another city and I won't, I won't call him out. I was like, but I can't afford to have, you know, that whole city on my payroll. So maybe you could help talk with some of the owners of the bars where they're leaving about risk and stuff. But, I thought that was really a cool response to it. And, and then he said, I'll only save it for times when it's like this or whatever.

Because he didn't drink, he was a designated driver a lot. He did that, so you know that these again these came from conversations, but they also came from me knowing about brain development. So that was the first one. The second one is about talking about, you know, your background and what and I think Catrina explained it really well, but it's difficult sometimes. To, to talk and, you know, for some of us, it's wonderful that we grew up in a time when there's no social media, no cameras and videos in everybody's hands. I certainly am happy for that. Just remember, I mentioned earlier that I played guitar in a bar, and it's been part of the part-time job for about 5 years. So, you know, I, you know, I learned a lot and I said I would do things differently. I most certainly would. We'll get the chance. I think a lot of our parenting is in a way providing things for our kids that we didn't have access to, whether we get scientific information or just, you know, safe and healthy, but most parents want to do the right thing and I remember my kids having an argument in the back when they went about this topic. And one of them was saying that they wouldn't do this and I was like, yeah, they, they, you, you call them any time.

No, they didn't, they didn't and they're going back and forth. They didn't realize they were arguing about this, but I heard arguing going on the back. And, so I have called them. They've come in. They ask me questions, and by the way, I, this is something we've gone back and forth on the best presentation method because we don't have a lot of science on it. Like we don't have science on that act. We provide different skill sets for people to use as an opportunity to fill that void. But we haven't formally tested to say this is the exact specific way that's the best practice to have a conversation so that it works. That's part of the problem. I'm not sure we could do a large study of that kind.

And the reason is because I'm not sure that it could show the cost effectiveness of it, because we'd have to show how many people chose not to get the ride and got in trouble versus ones that got the ride to be able to show the advantages of getting the ride and so on. So it's really a challenge to do some studies. We just can't, we can't do that. We can't follow the people that would have called, but then gotten car crashes versus the ones that didn't. So it would be a challenge to do this study. So what we try to do is fill the void with anecdotal information for parents that have had those conversations and been successful. We talk to teens and say what would be the best way that you would want your parents to do it, and then we try to come up with different ways to do that.

Laura: Beautiful. I, you know, I will say that so for my 12 year old, she has a couple different businesses and so she's out in the world in in ways that I probably wasn't at 12, but, so we've been using the, you know, a code message for, you know, I'm in an uncomfortable situation, please come and get me already. Even if it's just, you know, like I've been with my friends too long and I need a break, and, but I don't want to lose face with my friends, she'll call me, use our message, and I, you know, or send me a text, you know, saying with our code, and then I can come and be the bad guy and pick her up to make sure she it's that break that she needs.

Robert: I think that speaks well for the future.

Laura: Yeah, so I do think starting small and starting when they're younger, building that trust of like, there will be no questions asked. Like I'm always happy to support you in advocating for yourself, you know, like, and tuning into your needs and making a choice that's healthy for you.

Catrina: Yeah, doing that self-reflection and being able to identify when something feels uncomfortable, understanding their agency, allowing them to make that choice and have an exit strategy on the front end. You know, so that they're not trying to solve that problem at the moment, right, with or without substances, right? Substances only exacerbate the issue, but with or without substances developmentally, they're just not at that place.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely.

Catrina: Create that level of discernment. And so having that conversation is preparing them not only for circumstances with peer pressure or nuances around substances, but other things that come adjacent to that through. Relationships, you know, other nuances that can show up for safety, both physically and emotionally.

Robert: Beautiful Laura, you mentioned your background in human development. Can I have just a minute to kind of share something for parents because you're trying to talk to parents, parents, so here's something I've learned. And when I first started doing this work. I was, you know, working with high school parents and I got older because of the need and the absence of work for, for college parenting impact. I think there's a perspective out there that parents are reluctant to change. It's not like it's been published out there, but we're gonna be, we're talking about topics that may be consistent with the values of the parents that your listeners, and there may be some that aren't. They might be, you know, I've heard this like, well, you can't be too wishy-washy with your kid. You can't give into everything just because you communicate. So, we did this study because I was curious about the pluses and minuses that parents can do, like good things they do and things that could cause harm.

And we didn't have a lot of agreement within our team as to how things are gonna pan out. And so what we did was we measured communication, we measured positive and negative communication, like the things that you say that are positive and respond well versus the things you say that are negative and not well received, and so on, like when you punish your kids and scold them. Come on, get your coat. We really have to go, you know, that kind of stuff. And then we measured monitoring, just general like, so what are you doing this weekend, so what are you doing with your friends? How long are you gonna be there? Is there gonna be a parent there, that kind of stuff versus alcohol-related mon like is it gonna be, you know, alcohol questions about monitoring alcohol. And we also looked at rules in the home, and the rules being, are you allowed to drink or you're not allowed to drink, right? So, if we were to guess, we would say that we also looked at the background of the parents in their drinking. Right, so parents that maybe drank a lot, maybe had some problems and ones that were rap sneaks. And so we had a lot of information with which to categorize parenting profiles, and we found 4 different profiles.

We use really advanced statistical methods, but we found 4 profiles, and these are gonna make perfect sense when I say what they are. One was where the mom had an alcohol problem. Okay. And that was a big part of that profile. You know, they could communicate, they could have this, they could have that, they could monitor and so on. But the mom having an alcohol problem is like one of the dimensions of that profile that was the, it was in the, in the family space. And then we had another one where the dad had an alcohol problem. Again, that space. And we had one group of parents that I kind of, I don't, I won't label them as the ideal parent, but in a lot of ways they were the most protective. They communicated more positive things, fewer negative communications. They monitor their kids positively, knowing where they were and whether there's a parent in place that they weren't there, that kind of stuff. And then we looked at whether they drank, and then they looked at, and they tended not to drink a lot. They might have been social drinkers. So they modeled good behavior that way. And then the rules, they didn't let their kids drink.

Okay. That was it, so that was like, I like an ideal low risk parent. And then there was another profile that's exactly the same as the ideal low risk parent. But instead of not letting their kids drink, they let them drink on special occasions. In limited amounts. So we have an alcoholic mom or an alcohol problem mom, alcohol problem dad profile. The ideal parent where they set rules that are anti-alcohol, and then there's the ones that are ideal parents, but they allow alcohol to be there. And we looked at the risks of the kids among many dimensions. And we found one group, the one dimension that we looked at, which I think is worth explaining. We called it the MRC group, and MRC group stands for multiple and repeated consequences. In other words, they have lots of different consequences that occur. They drink and then they repeat them over time. And this is a group of kids that are about 20% of the kids. But they count for 60% of the problems that exist in a particular site, right? So that's a big, if you're in that group, you're experiencing a lot of consequences and you're making up kind of a small proportion of the parents of kids, right? And we thought, okay, which parenting group is most likely to have a kid be in that MRC group versus not? Is that something we could target, right? Yeah, I want to repeat this. They make up 1 in 5 of the kids. Right, but they accounted for 60% of all the problems of the kids in that community or that school, right, so the small amount of kids count for a lot of problems. Well, The odds of being in the MRC positive group, if you have an alcoholic father, was 5 to 1. 1 in 1 in 1 in 1 in 5 kids. Did that.

The mother group was neither positive or negative, and didn't have as much of an impact on being in the MRC group. Then we looked at the parents that were ideal. And the parents that I deal with everything but setting, but not limiting alcohol. And the ones that were not limiting alcohol, they were 3 and 5. They, they, so they're almost similar. Depending on the alcoholic father, even though there's a lot of communication, a lot of modeling, a lot of monitoring, the rule was the only thing that was different. The kids that were in the group whose parents did everything right and then had that rule, they were the least likely it was almost like net like none. So, when we look at these groups of parents, when you said earlier, well, we're not gonna do everything right, right? And we're not. We're not. It just shows that you cannot compensate. By communicating positively and modeling really well and monitoring if your rules are permissive with letting your kids drink in small amounts in controlled settings. It's almost like having a parent that has a major alcohol problem.

Laura: Wow. It really drives home the point of how important that specific thing is.

Robert: Exactly. Before when I said early onset is one of the factors, try and delay that initiation as long as possible into the 20s or whatever, 19, 20, 21, it keeps getting better and better, the more the delay. And by a parent just pumping the brakes on saying, oh, let them go to a party, let him do this, let them do that, their whole life. So you're not restricting alcohol forever. You're only restricting it for a certain period of time when they're at most risk. So when I said they don't have to intervene. They don't need the intervention.

Laura: They just got it.

Robert: Yeah, just a chance to examine would parents be resistant to change if we simply ask them. So if we just spewed statistics of people, that's not a positive way to do it. What we really did was we said, here's what we've seen in our studies. What are your concerns? And then they tell us what their concerns are. And then we say, what do you do in your home to reduce those concerns? And then they tell us what they do. And most of them told us they communicated. And then what else do you do? And then some said, well, we monitor a lot, and so, well, what else do you do? And they're like, well, that's kind of what we do. Well, what they, what we learned a lot is about the rules and for the percentage of ones that allowed alcohol, we said, you know, we understand that you're doing something and it's counterintuitive, the way the findings play out. And once we shared that with them in a nonjudgmental manner, how willing would you be to just pump the brakes on that. 0% of those parents said yes. And I know he'd asked them, well, tell us why. Well, you just shared all this information with us, why would we want to do this? And so I find that parents are willing to change if provided with a good reason and not told what to do.

Laura: Right. And in particular in alignment with that overarching goal of most parents really wanting to do what's best for their kids. Yeah, beautiful.

Robert: Yeah, it was really exciting to see that. We're tracking these kids now that they're seniors to see if they're reducing the alcohol problems if they're seniors. And then we're gonna track them for a couple of years after that to see if it sustains itself. And, and, and I, I'll give a plug to NIH. NIH has been a good supporter of this because we know that if we're able to reduce this with just a brief intervention. What's this idea of reaching, asking very little. Like I'm not asking parents to change out all their communication patterns or all the monitoring and all the things they do say, maybe just pump the brakes on this one for now.

Laura: You know, yeah, and it has a huge impact.

Robert: It's easy exactly, reaching the largest number of people we possibly can. And, and I will say this, Ned was right, well before we even knew it. So like this they, when they said don't let anybody drink until 21, the data is behind it, showing that the likelihood of having an alcohol problem in your life is if you delay it. And then if you don't let this, you're also in the highest, you're the best group for not leaving problems with problems, but you're also not gonna be in the group that experiences the most consequences, the most problems.

Laura: And I think part of the reason that's so important to mad and why we were so integral in passing that 21 minimum drinking age law is because we know that a byproduct of that negative consequence is impaired driving, right? We know that the more likely that is to take place, the more frequent a person is going to drive impaired, which is going to ultimately end up in a very devastating outcome and that's what we're here to prevent. I think one thing I just want to leave in closing is that the thing that is really positive that I continue to see in the survey data that we do regularly is just as recent as I think 2022, 2023.

In partnership with Nationwide, who sponsors, who's our national presenting sponsor of this program and the General Motors Foundation, who helped to help us execute this perception survey is that overarching parents continue to underestimate how important their voice and their perspective is, and that teens and preteens continue to tell us that while parents think their friends are the most influential impact on them, parents are the number one influence on whether a teen decides to drink or not drink underage or use or not use substances under age. So whether they feel like they're not being heard, they are, and I think that's part of that beautiful mix of Dr. Turrisi's research and the way he goes about working with families and being able to demonstrate how to have that conversation to enrich that relationship so that parents start to walk away from their their conversations feeling like they're heard, and teens really understand the intentions behind what that looks like for them, and really safer outcomes for everyone.

Robert: You know, Catrina, I wanted you to be the last word. But I want to compliment you and say that because of mad. The signs that we do reach a new family every 15 minutes. Our estimates are like 10 to 15, but we know that it's every 15 minutes. So for parents that are listening and thinking, well, I don't want to be the one parent that's like this. You're not, because we've been on the air now for, for over an hour. That means 4 more families went to the website and got this information, got this information that's, it's literally life-changing. So it's not, it's not asking a lot and you're not changing a whole lot of your parenting. You're just trying to make these small points make a difference. And, and that's what, when I said, meds in every place that you can imagine, that's a good thing. It really is good for all of us. Catrina said it better than I did, but I wanted people to know that because of their efforts. Every 15 minutes.

Laura: It's beautiful. Thank you, Doctor Turrisi. Thank you so much, Catrina. I really appreciate the gift of your knowledge and expertise here with us today.

Catrina: Thank you for having us. I really appreciate the conversation.

Robert: And again, thank you for having us and lending a voice to the people that are working hard to make this not make this a better place to live.

Laura: Yeah, I think that's what we're all going for, so thank you.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.

All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!

Laura Froyen, PhD

Laura Froyen, PhD

Balanced Parent Podcast

Laura Froyen, PhD

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Episode 236: The Truth About Teen Drinking: What Parents Need to Know and How to Talk About It with Dr. Robert Turrisi and Catrina Clemens