According to researchers who patiently tracked booze-swilling among parents for three decades, mothers are the parental figures most likely to turn their children into future winos who wander red-eyed into pharmacies and purchase the largest and finest cask of Woodbridge pinot noir their local druggist has to offer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se, it’s just that politely sipping a Twisted Tea at a friend’s law school graduation and getting ride-in-a-pedicab drunk might be linked to how many glasses of chardonnay one’s mother liked to have at dinner.
A British think tank called Demos tracked the drinking patterns of 18,000 people over the last three decades, finding that, at about 16, those more precocious drinkers were most influenced by their peers, while at 34, their propensity to “binge drink” correlated to how much they had thought, as a young-un, that their mother drank. Researchers found that for each step on the four-point scale of booziness that mothers ascended, their children’s drinking rose about 1.3 times above government recommendations. Fathers, meantime, had no such effect on their kids’ adulthood drinking habits