Trust between parents and teens can prevent lying and drinking

Building trust between parents and teenagers can make youngsters less likely to lie and drink, a new study finds. And scientists warn that excessive parental supervision may aggravate the problems.

Trust is an important foundation for any relationship and nowhere is this more true than when we talk about parents and their teenage children as a new study found that mutual trusts makes youngsters less likely to lie and drink.

A joint study by New York University and HSE researchers, published at Journal of Adolescence, suggests that both honesty and a lower risk of developing a drinking habit are usually the results of a trusting relationship between a teenager and parents.

On the other hand, adolescents who have a greater tendency to lie to their parents are also more likely to start using alcohol at an earlier age.

Scientists reached this conclusion after a longitudinal study conducted by U.S. and Russian researchers, using a sample of more than 4,000 U.S. seventh- and eighth-graders and their mothers.

After questioning the teens and their mothers while also examining the parent-teenager relationship, scientists found that adolescents who admitted to lying to adults were more likely to have a drinking habit or a higher risk of future alcohol addiction than those who reported being honest with their parents.

This is the first paper to examine the relationship between teenage lies and alcohol use. Earlier studies focused more on the role of parental supervision in early alcoholism prevention. It also confirmed that a warm and trusting child-parent relationship could lower both the tendency to lie to adults and the risk of developing a drinking habit in one’s teens.

Adolescents tend to disclose more about themselves if they feel that they are supported by their parents, leading to a higher satisfaction of family relationship. In return, this satisfaction lowers the likelihood of both lying and drinking.

When it comes to how to best deal with lying and drinking situations, the study also revealed another important piece of information. Overly controlling parents had children that lied more and thus were at higher risks of drinking. So excessive parental supervision only aggravate rather than solve the problem.

“Adolescence is the age at which children in our societies work hard to develop their skills of autonomy,” said Victor Kaploun, Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg, and co-author of the paper in a press release.”In a situation where trust is absent from the relationship between parents and their teenage children, the latter might consider both lying and drinking as acceptable practices for developing autonomy skills. This is why such behaviours are interconnected, while excessive parental control can be counterproductive.”

The study also found that teens with friends that drink alcohol are more likely to lie to their parents, but this tendency was mostly observed in boys.

The findings could be used in order to develop new strategies in managing drinking among teenagers. According to the data of the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse, dealing with the phenomenon in the U.S., underage drinking have become a serious public health problem.

Latest statistics show that by age 15, about 33 per cent of teens have had at least one drink and by age 18, about 60 per cent of teens have had at least one alcohol drink. 5.1 million young people reported binge drinking at least once a month and 1.3 million young people reported binge drinking on 5 or more days during a month.

And drinking becomes more problematic with age as older teens drink more than younger teens.