NAGGING TEENAGERS TO DRINK

OTTAWA - Teenagers are more likely to get drunk and use drugs if they
believe their parents are nagging them constantly, a new study says.

But Statistics Canada's first national study of alcohol and drug use among
12- to 15-year-olds also found peer group pressure is the strongest risk
factor for substance abuse, with drinking and drug-taking more likely when
their friends also drank or did drugs.

The survey of 4,296 young people, released Tuesday, found four in 10 had
consumed one alcoholic drink at least once and more than one in five (22
per cent) had been drunk.

About one-fifth (or 19 per cent) also reported having smoked marijuana.

The younger adolescents were not asked about hallucinogens -- including
mushrooms, ecstasy and LSD -- but 11 per cent of teens aged 14 and 15
reported having tried them.

The average age which they reported they had their first drink was 12.4
years, and they first got drunk on average at 13.2 years of age. The
average age for first-time marijuana use was slightly younger, at 13.1, and
for experimenting with hallucinogens slightly older, at 13.8.

"Statistically, we wouldn't characterize it as common or an epidemic," said
co-author Dave Haans of Statistics Canada's Research Data Centre at the
University of Toronto.

"Experimenting with alcohol and drugs in adolescence is fairly common. One
of the other ways of looking at our figures is the majority of adolescents
in our survey engaged in no substance use. It's a matter of seeing the
glass half full or half empty."

After asking the young teens several questions about their relationships
with their parents, the researchers considered three aspects: hostile
parenting, parental monitoring and parent-child cohesion.

Only young people whose parents had a negative or hostile parenting style
were found to have significantly high odds of drinking to intoxication or
drug use. The odds of being drunk and engaging in drug use increased by a
factor of about 1.1 for every point increase in the hostile parenting scale.

But the study cautions against drawing any conclusions about cause and effect.

"The causal direction of the relationship between hostile parenting and
substance use cannot be inferred, however. It is possible that the parents'
way of dealing with the adolescent may have changed following problem
behaviours such as alcohol or drug use," the report states.

The researchers also can't explain why the odds of using drugs were nearly
double for young adolescents in step-parent families compared with those in
traditional two-parent families.

"We didn't find the same relationship about alcohol use. We're not entirely
certain as to why that may be the case," said Haans.

The survey also bucked a trend found in other studies that suggests
high-risk behaviours may occur when teens feel stressed and seek comfort,
relief, or escape through drug use.

When other influences in the teens' lives were considered, the Statistics
Canada researchers did not find a relationship between drug use and
emotional problems, and the odds of being drunk in the past year were lower
for adolescents reporting emotional problems.

The data was collected in 1998/99 as part of a national long-term survey of
children and youth.

More recent data sets have been collected, but not yet analysed.

HAVE YOUR SAY

- - Do you think parental nagging drives teenagers to drink, or is peer
pressure the strongest risk factor for substance abuse? Tell us what you
think at city@thejournal.canwest.com