If youre the parent of a teen, you may worry that your child will be faced with many opportunities to drink before theyre of age. You might even wonder, since it seems inevitable, if you should offer your adolescent their first drink in your home .

On the one hand, youre right to be concerned. Underage drinking is associated with a number of dangerous behaviors, such as car accidents, and alcohol in large quantities can cause serious illness or even death.

But if youre imagining todays teens at the same parties and parking lots that may have marked your own youth or the ones youre used to seeing portrayed on TV you may be less tapped into their reality than you think. In fact, a new report shows that teen substance use is declining.

What Substance Use Looks Like Among Teens Today

Findings from the 2023 Monitoring the Future survey, an NIH-funded study that has been tracking teen substance abuse in the U.S. for almost 50 years, show that teen alcohol use continues to decrease, a consistent trend since the survey began collecting data in the 1970s.

In 1978, 93% of 12th graders reported ever having used alcohol. This number was down to 80% in 1993, and this year hit a new low of 53%.

The 2023 survey collected data from 7,584 12th graders in 83 schools; 8,494 10th grade students in 76 schools; and 6,240 eighth grade students in a different 76 schools. Schools were selected to provide a representative cross section of teens in the contiguous 48 states.

Here are some of the 2023 surveys noteworthy findings.

• The number of abstainers (students who had never used nicotine, alcohol or drugs; a number which the survey has been tracking since 2017) reached a high of 37.5% for 12th graders. For 10th graders, 54.4% reported total abstention from substance use. For eighth graders, this number was 70%.
• The number of students who reported drinking alcohol over the past 12 months was 45.7% for 12th graders, 30.6% for 10th graders and 15.1% for eighth graders. All of these numbers have been on a steady downward trend for decades.
• Following a small uptick in 2020, the number of students who reported having been drunk in the past 12th months also hit record lows: 25.1% for 12th graders, 13.1% for 10th graders and 4.6% for eighth graders.
• The rate at which teens in all three grades disapprove of binge drinking has been, and remains, high.

We see that past year use in eighth and 10th graders is stable from 2022 and down in 12th graders from 2022 to 2023, Dr. Maria Rahmandar , medical director of the substance use and prevention program at Northwesterns Feinberg School of Medicine, told HuffPost. Rahmandar, who was not affiliated with the study, noted that these are encouraging trends.

These declining rates of use in high school seniors are significant in that they demonstrate the potential lifetime reduction in substance use by delaying the onset of alcohol and other substances, said Leslie Kimball, executive director of Responsibility.org , an organization funded by alcohol manufacturers dedicated to the prevention of underage drinking and drunk driving.

Kimball credits the steady decline in teens alcohol use to adults who care and who want to keep kids safe.

Conversations between parents and kids have increased by over 30% over the past 20 years and in that same period, underage drinking declined by over 50%, she said.

Research shows that a persons risk of developing an alcohol use disorder goes up significantly the earlier they begin drinking.

This can be tricky for parents to understand. We may have seen a majority of our own peers using alcohol before high school graduation, or maybe know someone who went on to develop alcohol use disorder. Yet, while the majority of teens who try alcohol dont develop a problem, the majority of people with a drinking problem started using as teens. The best way to reduce a young persons risk is to delay the onset of use.