longer.blue

Try telling a six-year-old to eat more protein. The advice is correct. It just means nothing to them. They feel indestructible. Recovery is automatic. Metabolic health is a problem for later. Same with your father warning you about your heart. For years, it is just noise. Then one day it is not. That is the point: people do not absorb information when it is true. They absorb it when it becomes relevant. My new paper in Health Economics shows that the same logic helps explain how drinking passes from parents to children. Using 23 waves of the HILDA Survey and 43,817 parent-child observations, I study the intergenerational transmission of alcohol consumption — the first application of Bisin and Verdier’s rational trait transmission model to drinking, and the first use of cohort-layering (Lee & Solon 2009) for a HILDA intergenerational sample. The core result is simple: Children do not copy everything their parents do. They copy what becomes useful in their own life. And for drinking, that happens in two windows. First: ages 15-17. That is when alcohol enters teenage social life. Suddenly, what your parents do is no longer abstract. It becomes a live template. Second: ages 28-37. That is when people start building families of their own and fall back on the household patterns they grew up with. Outside those windows, the transmission weakens or disappears. Shift the exposure window to before age 14 and it is gone. Drinking is not a live issue in a 10-year-old’s world. The transmission is overwhelmingly same-sex. Daughters drink like mothers. Sons drink like fathers. There is no father-daughter effect. Mothers also shape sons, but only at the two moments when drinking actually becomes salient: adolescence and early parenthood. The non-birth-parent results sharpen the story even further. Mother-daughter transmission survives even without biological ties. Father-son transmission weakens. So for women, this looks strongly like household norm transmission. For men, biology appears to matter more. The most interesting implication is about cohort change. At ages 28-37, sons with children pick up strong paternal transmission. Sons without children do not. But maternal transmission persists either way. So childless sons still look like their mothers. And because mothers drink less on average, that channel helps push male drinking down across cohorts as more men remain childless through those years. One more result: drinking habits are sticky. In the HILDA panel, people are about twice as likely to change their social status as their drinking behaviour. So the lesson is not “kids watch what parents do.” The lesson is harsher and more precise: People internalise what becomes relevant to who they are, what they do, and the stage of life they are in. Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hec.70084 The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/is-it-ok-to-drink-in-front-of-your-kids-new-research-shows-the-age-theyre-most-influenced-278667