According to The Independent, a study found that the drinking habits parents model at home carry over to their children, with parental influence strongest when children are aged 15 to 17. The effect runs mostly along same-sex lines, with mothers influencing daughters most clearly and fathers influencing sons, while no detectable father-to-daughter effect was observed. There is some crossover from mothers to sons, particularly during adolescence and again in the late twenties and thirties.
The study used 23 years of nationally representative Australian data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, tracking over 6,600 people and drawing on over 43,000 observations. It measures repeated patterns of drinking over years, not one-off moments, and what matters is the background signal of how often alcohol appears, how much, and what role it seems to play in everyday life. Parental influence on drinking declines through the twenties and rebounds at ages 28–37 for those who become parents.
When adult children become parents themselves, they appear to revisit the drinking habits they grew up with, with daughters drawing on their mothers’ examples and sons who become fathers following paternal patterns they had not previously adopted. The evidence points more toward household norms than genetics, as the mother-to-daughter link held firm regardless of biological connection when comparing birth parents with non-birth parents. It remains unclear what specific behaviors parents can tweak to improve the chance their children will have a healthy relationship with alcohol, and whether the findings apply to populations outside of Australia or in different cultural contexts.
The study did not detail how it defined and measured 'drinking habits' or 'average drinking' for parents and children, nor how it accounted for other factors like peer influence, socioeconomic status, or mental health in shaping drinking habits.