|
 Researchers focused on sixth graders in rural communities in
Pennsylvania and Iowa who attended schools that offered seven weeks
of counseling to both students and parents to see if kids who didn’t
participate in this program might still benefit from it.
Three years later, in ninth grade, the students who didn’t attend
the counseling sessions were 40 percent more likely to get drunk and
more than twice as likely to smoke if none of their friends went
through the program either, compared with those who skipped the
program but had at least three friends who did participate.
“Adolescents are often influenced by their friends,” said lead study
author Kelly Rulison, a researcher in public health and education at
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
“Teens whose friends participated in a family-based substance use
prevention program benefited from the program even though their own
families did not participate,” Rulison said by email.
Roughly one third of U.S. high school students drink, and one in
five of them admits to doing so excessively or getting in a car with
a drunk driver, according to a recent survey of teens by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Nearly nine in ten smokers tried their first cigarette by age 18,
according to the CDC. Each day in the U.S. alone, more than 3,800
youth aged 18 or younger smoke their first cigarette.
To see if teens cautioned against drinking and smoking might
influence their friends to abstain, Rulison and colleagues followed
5,449 students who didn’t participate in counseling that was offered
at their schools.
During sixth grade, students and their parents who did join the
program went through seven weeks of counseling, meeting separately
for an hour and then together for another hour.
Parent-only sessions focused on establishing rules, discipline and
communication, while teens concentrated on resisting peer pressure
and building social skills. Together, parents and children explored
ways to improve communication and cohesiveness within their
families.
Researchers also surveyed teens who didn’t participate in these
sessions, questioning them about drug and tobacco use as well as
asking them to name up to two best friends and up to five other
close friends.
At the start of the study, there were no differences in tobacco or
alcohol use among the teens who didn’t participate in the counseling
program.
[to top of second column] |
But as time passed, the teens who had more friends in the program
were much less likely to get drunk or smoke than their peers who
didn’t have any.
In this real-world study, researchers didn’t control which teens
participated in the program or whether nonparticipants had friends
who went through the counseling sessions, the researchers note in
the Journal of Adolescent Health. That makes it impossible to say
for sure whether having friends in the program, rather than other
factors, may have encouraged the teens outside the program to drink
and smoke less.
But it’s not surprising that some teens may be able to sway their
friends to avoid these behaviors, said Ken Winters, founder of the
Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research at the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis.
“It is likely that the influence is greatest when the teen receiving
the program is a leader among his peers – a peer influencer rather
than a peer follower,” Winters, who wasn’t involved in the study,
said by email.
The study also offers more evidence to parents of the benefit of
keeping tabs on their children as well as their kids’ friends, said
Bradley Boekeloo, a researcher in community health at the University
of Maryland in College Park, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“The study does suggest that parent involvement in their kids’ free
time through monitoring of unstructured activity is very important
to preventing youth drunkenness and smoking,” he said by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1TThGfd Journal of Adolescent Health, online
July 22, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
