It’s a Friday evening and you pour a glass of wine while your teenager sits at the kitchen bench scrolling their phone. They barely look up. But they notice more than you think.

My new study found the drinking habits parents model at home carry over to their children.

The influence is strongest during a specific window: when children are aged 15 to 17. This is the stage when teens begin navigating social situations with alcohol and start deciding what “normal” drinking looks like.

It doesn’t mean you have to give up alcohol altogether. But there are behaviours you can tweak to improve the chance your children will have a healthy relationship with alcohol as they grow up.

Tracking influence over 23 years

My study used 23 years of nationally representative Australian data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. This tracked more than 6,600 people over time, drawing on more than 43,000 observations.

To estimate parental influence, I linked each person’s drinking at a given age to their mother’s and father’s average drinking when that person was aged 12–18. I then compared how strongly those links showed up at different stages of life.

I found parental influence is strongest when children are aged 15–17, declines through the twenties, and rebounds at 28–37 for those who have become parents.

The effect runs mostly along same-sex lines. Mothers influence daughters most clearly, and fathers influence sons. There is no detectable father-to-daughter effect.

There is some crossover from mothers to sons, particularly........

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