New Zealand teens are drinking less, possibly because they spend more time online rather than socialising outside the home. Photo / Getty Images
New Zealand teens are drinking less, possibly because they spend more time online rather than socialising outside the home. Photo / Getty Images
New Zealand teens may be drinking less because they spend more time online and less time at parties, a new study says.
Most high school students today have never had more than a few sips of alcohol - an almost complete reversal from 20 years ago when the majority regularly drank to intoxication.
The drivers of this dramatic change of behaviour in such a short period are not well understood, but University of Otago researchers say it may be down to changes in the way teenagers socialise.
“Twenty years ago, young people would go out, hang out on the streets, go to the park, the beach, drive around in cars, often with alcohol involved,” said Dr Jude Ball, a public health researcher. “Whereas today’s teens are more often socialising online and when they do meet face-to-face it’s in each other’s homes with parents present, so young people are spending a lot less time unsupervised.”
Teen drinking rates have been falling since the 2000s, along with other risk-taking behaviours such as substance abuse, smoking and early sex. While the change in the drinking rate is well-established, less is known about what is causing it.
Avoiding alcohol is no longer considered just for "nerds and weirdos", says University of Otago public health researcher Dr Jude Ball.
Ball and her colleagues interviewed 64 students aged 14 to 17 at a co-ed Wellington school last year and compared their responses with 41 Christchurch students of the same age in a 1999-2001 study.
The differences were “striking”, they found. In the older cohort, more than half the students were regularly drinking and going to parties by Year 10 (age 14-15) and by Year 12 all of them had a least some experience of drinking with peers.
In comparison, just one of the Year 10 students interviewed last year said they drank alcohol socially. Even among Years 11-12, around three-quarters did not drink or drank moderately on rare occasions and usually did so with family.
The researchers found alcohol was a central part of adolescent life and identity 20 years ago, and teetotallers were rare and excluded.
“You were automatically a nerd or a weirdo if you didn’t drink at parties,” Ball said. “Today, there are still friend groups who are into drinking and partying but there are other groups who just aren’t interested.”
There were varied reasons for this. Drinking was increasingly seen by young people as a risky, unhealthy activity and something that got in the way of achieving their goals, in sports or elsewhere.
“I’ve got better things to do than party,” one student told the researchers. “I’m looking out for my future here. I can’t have this distraction.”
There had also been a social shift. Peer pressure was not as common, and young people appeared to be more accepting of others’ individual choices.
“It feels like there aren’t [such] strict unwritten rules for being a teenager,” one Year 11 student told the researchers. “Maybe it’s because the internet has made liking different things much more prevalent... I think people are just more understanding of the fact that everyone’s different.”
From a public health perspective, the findings were not all positive. Many of the drivers that had led to reduced drinking - less independence, less face-to-face time with friends, more pressure to succeed - were not necessarily good for youth wellbeing in general.
Ball said this underlined the need for targeted measures to reduce alcohol harm further, including stricter marketing and higher taxes.
The Government had planned to review alcohol pricing, marketing and sponsorship this year but it was shelved until next year as part of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ focus on “bread and butter” policies.
It is not yet clear how persistent the teen drinking changes may be and whether it means young New Zealanders will remain “dry” throughout their lives. It is possible that the current generation of teens ais–simply delaying alcohol use and will catch up with previous generations by early adulthood, the Otago paper says. New Zealand research shows binge drinking is still highly prevalent in this age group.
