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Abstract
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In order to understand the decline in adolescent drinking it is important to examine country‐specific factors as well as far‐reaching factors which changed contemporaneously with adolescent drinking. Examination of such potential factors should be carried out between countries with similar as well as different drinking cultures and control policies.
Raitasalo and colleagues [1] have provided new insights into the ongoing investigations of declining youth drinking by conducting a robust cross‐national analysis among countries with similar drinking cultures and political environments. They found that reductions in the perceived availability of alcohol and daily smoking, along with increases in parental control were associated with the decline in heavy episodic drinking (HED) across Finland, Norway and Sweden between 1999 and 2015. The novel analytical design utilized in the study provided significant evidence that three countries with similar drinking cultures and alcohol policies have the same factors associated with a decline in adolescent HED.
While these factors seem to have made a substantial contribution to the decline in HED in the included countries, the authors themselves highlight that a large portion of the decline remained unexplained. Changes in parental practices and attitudes seem to be emerging as a key theme in this area [2, 3]. A recent systematic review by Vashishtha et al. [4] indicated that the most robust evidence for explanatory factors underpinning the decline in adolescent alcohol consumption relates to a range of parental factors. It has been established previously that general aspects of parenting such as parent-child relationship quality, parental support and parental involvement play a key role in preventing adolescent alcohol misuse [5, 6]. Future research could be extended to examine the role of broader parenting...
Language: en |