"How Helicopter Parents Cause Binge Drinking" by Caitlin Flanagan in September's The Atlantic is must reading.
Just a sample: "Drinking isn 't like doing drugs - it's not something parents recoil from in horror. It's something they can make an accommodation for, and so they practice "social hosting", as the law refers to the custom: allowing teens to get hammered in the comfort and safety of the rec room....better for Charlotte to barf her guts out on the new sectional sofa than in the shadowy basement of a distant fraternity house." The author points out that parent meetings like "Teens and Drinking," "don't involve any moral or emotional imperatives; it has to do only with not ending up dead or in jail."