Feasibility of a text message-based alcohol prevention intervention for parents of rising middle school students

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Early-onset alcohol use (EOAU), or drinking before the age of 14 years, is a serious but highly preventable risk factor for later alcohol use. EOAU often begins at home, with sips of alcohol provided by parents. Few scalable interventions are available to engage parents in EOAU prevention.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of Better-Informed Parents Keeping Adolescents Safe From Alcohol (BIPAS Alcohol), a digital family-based intervention for parents of rising middle schoolers.

METHODS: In 2023-2024, we delivered BIPAS Alcohol to US parents (N=132) of 10- to 12-year-old children. The intervention consisted of a 3-month SMS text messaging curriculum and multimedia website. Guided by Bowen and colleagues' framework, we surveyed parents to evaluate our intervention on its feasibility, including acceptability, integration, demand, and adaptation. We interviewed a subset of parents (n=11) to probe survey findings.

RESULTS: Parents rated BIPAS Alcohol highly on acceptability, with almost all agreeing the intervention kept their attention (117/123, 95.1%), offered useful information (121/123, 98.4%), and helped reduce chances of underage drinking (119/123, 96.7%). Most parents indicated plans to integrate the intervention into family life by referring to content in the future (113/123, 91.9%) or sharing content with others (107/123, 87.0%). In interviews, parents expressed high demand for SMS text messages, due to their short, "digestible" format, while finding the website more cumbersome. Although we designed the SMS text message curriculum for adults, some parents reported adapting the intervention by sharing texts with their children.

CONCLUSIONS: Our digital family-based intervention demonstrated feasibility and warrants additional evaluation in a larger-scale trial with a wider audience.