WISE INTERVENTIONS

Parents of new college students learned in a 60-minute in-person session during the summer before college began (1) about college drinking, including how they as a group tend to “overestimate how accepting other parents are of drinking,” “underestimate the extent to which other parents speak to their children about alcohol,” and “underestimate how much their child would drink in college,” as well as (2) research showing parents’ ongoing influence on students’ drinking in college and (3) discussed strategies to speak with their child about college drinking effectively, reduced students’ reports of the extent to which they drank in the first month of college by 30% as compared to a randomized control group. Using a non-randomized comparison group, Turrisi et al. (2001, 2010) found similar reductions in first-year college student drinking from a 35-page handbook distributed to parents.