Social Norms

 

New research is proving that parents are talking to their college aged children about alcohol use, based on social norms. Through a series of tests, it was determined that parents rely fairly heavily on how they believe other parents are parenting. Parents often times will base their parenting strategy on what they believe other parents are doing. Students seem to react to parental interaction in a positive manner when parents broach specific subjects of drinking habits. The experiment showed that ultimately, students tend to at least consider a parental plea to “be careful” or not “be crazy”. However, most times, parents see that interaction as “uncool” or “being helicopter parents” as defined by society. In an effort to not rock the boat, parents then do not bring up the difficult topics with their students, leaving the students to follow the campus norms. Many parents believe, often incorrectly, that while teens are teens, if you just “leave them alone” they will figure it out. However, new research could be concluding that college-aged students do in fact look to parental guidance above campus teaching. Without parental guidance, students turn to their “friends” for the guidance and help to get out of the dark. This is when the concepts of “…because everyone else is doing it…” comes into play. When students tell students, “everyone’s doing it” and there is no one speaking the factual truth to students, they are more likely to believe that such information is true and as such, participate in activities that they would be less likely to participate in if they were given more information.  Therefore, it is being further explored into that perhaps the best way to reduce the extensive drinking happening on campuses, would be to change the parental “norm” that says that students need to be left to figure life out for themselves. Regardless of the age or stage of students, parents are still needed and still play one of the more influential parts of guidance in a child’s life throughout their lives regardless of whether children believe they need their parents or not.

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