"CASA created Family Day - A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children in 2001, as a national effort to promote family dinners as an effective way to reduce substance abuse among children and teens. Family Day is celebrated on the fourth Monday in September, the 26th in 2005.

Family Day emphasizes the importance of regular family activities and encourages Americans to make family dinners a regular feature of their lives. Parental engagement is the single most potent weapon in preventing substance use and abuse among youth!"

"'It's crazy, but having dinner together reinforces the family unit,' [Mrs. Powell] said. 'That's when we get to hear about their day. We ask them questions, and the other two can't butt in.'

After decades of decline in the simple ritual of family dinners, there is evidence that many families are making the effort to gather at the dinner table. A random nationwide survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found a recent rise in the number of children ages 12 to 17 who said they ate dinner with their families at least five times a week, to 58 percent last year from 47 percent in 1998."

Most parents of teenagers know that a problem confined to college campuses a generation ago haunts high school communities today: alcohol use. Yet a study of sophomores in Icelandic secondary schools suggests that the increase of divorce, the lack of parental involvement with their teens, and the decline of church attendance have each strengthened the appeal of the bottle to teenagers.

Parsing data from the 2000 European School Survey on Alcohol and Other Drugs, which obtained responses from 89 percent of all tenth graders in Iceland, three Icelandic and one American sociologist measured both individual and school factors related to alcohol use among teens. In both bivariate and multivariate statistical tests, including what the researchers describe as their "best fitting model," teens living in households without a father, without a mother, or with a stepparent were more likely to drink (all three household arrangements at both test levels were statistically significant). Also statistically significant across the board: Teens were less likely to drink if they reported that their parents knew of their evening whereabouts and if teens reported that they were emotionally close to at least one parent.

Teens also were less likely to drink if they reported that they regularly attended public worship and expressed confidence in getting "support from God" when in need (p< .001 for both variables). While individual parental religiosity did not yield significant correlations with teen drinking in the multivariate tests, among teens that attended schools where parents were more religious, females drank significantly less than did males (p< .05).

For parents anxious about teen vulnerability to drinking, these findings confirm that staying out of the divorce court and taking the family to church each week are powerful tools to keep their teenagers out of trouble.