Wine-Mom Culture, Alcohol Use, and Drinking Motives: A Descriptive Study and Cross-Cultural Exploration of American and British Mothers

Abstract

Objective: “Wine-mom” culture, which promotes the idea that women should use alcohol to cope with the stressors of parenting, is pervasive in modern society, yet remains an under-researched variable in the context of women’s alcohol use. The present investigation was a descriptive study and cross-cultural exploration (United States vs. United Kingdom) of the association between wine-mom culture (perceptions of wine-mom culture and related behaviors) and various alcohol-related outcomes, parenting experiences, and drinking motives. Methods: This study included 233 American and 233 British mothers recruited through Prolific. Participants completed the study questions/questionnaires in Qualtrics; they completed nine items measuring their perceptions of and engagement with wine-mom culture, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, the Parental Stress Scale, and the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised, along with questions about their alcohol use and parenting experiences. Results: Our results indicated that although American mothers were more familiar with wine-mom culture than British mothers, the correlations observed were similar for both groups. Some of the wine-mom culture variables were associated with problematic alcohol use and parenting stress. Additionally, wine-mom culture-related behaviors had moderate to strong positive correlations with drinking to cope motives. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that future research should examine the role of wine-mom culture in the perception that alcohol can—or should—be used as a form of self-medication. Other future directions and considerations for this area of study are discussed.

Keywords:

• Wine-mom culture
• alcoholuse
• drinking motives
• mothers
• parental stress
• cross-cultural exploration
• drinking to cope

Declaration of interest

The authors declare there is no Complete of Interest at this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Further research into the concept of one standard drink has illuminated potential cultural differences between the US and UK. One standard US drink contains about 14 grams (0.6 fl oz, 17.74 ml) of pure alcohol (National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2023). This amount equates to approximately 12 fl oz of regular beer, 5 fl oz of table wine, or 1.5 fl oz of liquor. The National Health Service (NHS, 2021) of United Kingdom measures alcohol consumption in units, with one unit equal to 8 grams (.34 fl oz, 10 ml) of pure alcohol. Therefore, a standard US 12 fl oz regular beer equates to approximately 1.7 UK units of alcohol, and a small glass of table wine equates to roughly 1.5 UK units of alcohol. In this study, participants were presented with a description and image of one standard drink (from the NIH—the American definition of a standard drink) before completing the AUDIT-10 questions. Although an explicit definition was provided to participants, there still remains a possibility that participants responded with cultural differences based on their perceptions of what constitutes a “drink.”

2 WMC social media engagement was identified as a significant negative predictor at p = .005. However, we believe this is due to the presence of suppression in the model resulting in the sign flipping from the correlation to the regression analyses (positive to negative). Specifically, WMC social media engagement had a positive zero-order correlation with the outcome variable across both groups (see Table 5). While multicollinearity diagnostics did not indicate issues with the regression models, it is likely that this occurred due to shared variance between this predictor and the other predictors /covariates.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an internal research award from the College of the Sciences and Mathematics at West Chester University.