How much alcohol do you typically drink in a week? A month? A year? Did your answer take into account how much you drink on New Year’s Eve? On Christmas? During the Super Bowl or World Cup?
When researchers compare how much alcohol is sold to how much people say they drink, alcohol consumption is underestimated by anywhere from 30% in the U.S. to 80% in Australia.
Special occasions such as holidays, weddings or major sporting events make up much of that difference. How much a person drinks at a special event can vary quite a bit, adding an extra four drinks per week for men and three drinks per week for women, and people usually don’t include these splurges in their tallies.
My research team studies alcohol use and its effects on parenting, with an ultimate goal to identify strategies that support positive parenting. Particularly in the festive holiday season – filled with gatherings where drinking is commonplace – understanding how special-occasion drinking affects how parents treat their children could help people change their routines in ways that make these occasions more enjoyable for everyone.
Alcohol’s effects on social problems
It’s not news that alcohol is related to many social problems: violence, traffic crashes, child abuse and neglect. Alcohol can enable bad behavior during special occasions. Incidents of drunken driving are highest after New Year’s Eve, for instance.
Alcohol use by men on days of major sporting events is related to more violence toward their families. However, because this relationship has been primarily studied among men, we don’t know if it is the same for women. Women’s drinking has increased over the past several decades, making this an important topic to understand.
Drinking while parenting can cause lax supervision of children or more harsh parenting practices. In our recent study, my colleagues and I wanted to see if a parent’s alcohol use on two special occasions was related to the use of aggressive discipline – whether physical punishment like spanking, or psychological aggression like yelling and name-calling.
As part of a larger study, we focused on two special occasions where drinking might differ from a typical day: Super Bowl Sunday and Valentine’s Day. What we found surprised us.
Drinking more on special days
In February 2021, we asked 307 parents to take three brief daily surveys for 14 days. We pushed a text message to parents’ phones at 10 a.m., 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. that asked questions about whether they had used specific discipline strategies since the last survey.
On the seventh and 14th day, the survey included questions about whether parents drank alcohol during the past week. If they did, we asked them to tell us on which days, and during what time frames. We matched the days and times they drank with parenting behaviors they’d previously reported. Importantly, 93% of parents in our study were mothers.
A higher percentage of parents drank at…
