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‍Our Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr Chris Davis, spoke to Kidspot about new research on what children quietly absorb from the way their parents drink.

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The University of New South Wales study followed thousands of Australian families over more than twenty years, and Chris told Kidspot there is a window where the influence is strongest. Between fifteen and seventeen, teenagers are becoming aware of alcohol in the world around them and often trying it for the first time, which makes them unusually alert to how the adults at home are using it. A second window opens much later, in our late twenties or when we become parents ourselves, when many of us drift back towards the way we saw our own parents drink. The pattern can carry as far as grandchildren.

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His advice to anyone reading it and looking at their evening glass was not to reach for guilt. "We've got to drop the guilt," he said, because guilt tends to make drinking secretive, and secrecy becomes a harmful cycle of its own. The more useful question is whether we are showing our children other ways to wind down. The article sits that alongside James Hunt, now two years sober, who told Kidspot he was certain he had hidden his evening routine from his three children and discovered they had been taking in every bit of it.

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You can read the full article on Kidspot.

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