Toddler Personality Traits Can Predict Teen Drinking Behaviors

Worried whether or not your kid will become a heavy drinker one day?

New research finds a correlation between children's behavior and their drinking habits as teens, according to Yahoo! News.

The study, which was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, looked at thousands of children in South West England from birth through 15 years. The dataset included personality information given from mothers during the first five years of the child's life and from both parents and the subjects thereafter.

Researchers found two opposing personality traits that more often lead to teen drinking. Children who are emotionally unstable and not sociable are more likely to drink, and that those who are extremely social and extroverted drink more as it leads to "sensation seeking."

"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," study co-author Danielle Dick said. "This is one of the most comprehensive attempts to understand very early childhood predictors of adolescent alcohol use in a large epidemiological study."

However, other factors also affect whether or not teens will drink, and one study can't fully predict teen drinking patterns.

"This underscores the fact that drinking during adolescence is largely a social phenomenon," Dick said. "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."