Behavioral Pattern in Childhood Can Predict Alcohol Use in Teenage Years

The behavioral patterns in children of five years of age could predict use of alcohol in their teenage years, a latest study reveals.

The study, published in the journal Clinical and Experimental Research, found that certain personalities in children can be related to teenage drinking.

"People don't enter adolescence as blank slates; they have a history of life experiences that they bring with them, dating back to early childhood," Danielle Dick, a psychologist from Virginia Commonwealth University and co-author of the study, said.

The research team examined the results of a study of thousand of newborns in South West England from birth to 15 years of age. Information about participants was collected from the mothers for the first five years, later both parents and the children were questioned about their behavior.

For the study, nearly 12,600 participants were questioned but some of them did not provide consistent data. Information from 6,504 boys and 6,143 girls, born between April 1991 and December 1992 were studied by the researchers.

"This indicates very different pathways to alcohol involvement/patterns that emerge early on, which has important implications for prevention efforts," Dick said, according to New York Daily News.

She said the results showed that drinking in teenage years is mostly a social phenomenon. "However, this doesn't mean it's less problematic; we know from other studies that most adolescent drinking is high risk - for example, binge drinking - and can lead to numerous negative consequences," Dick said.

The research team examined the behavioral characteristics in the participants six times from six months to six years of age. Later they gathered information on alcohol use among the participants once they reached 15.

Other studies have been done on teenagers and alcohol abuse. Some believe that the study is useful for further references, there are others who have reservations about it. "While I think the most important finding concerns tracing personality differences back to preschool differences in temperament, we cannot, from these findings, predict with much accuracy which preschoolers will have problems with alcohol as adolescents and which will not," Matt McGue, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who was not a part of the study, said in a statement.