September 09, 2026, Durham, NC – Adolescents encounter messages about alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, and other substances across social media, entertainment, advertising, and other parts of their everyday media environment. These messages can shape what young people perceive as normal, healthy, popular, or safe, often at the same time they are beginning to make more independent decisions about their lives.

Parents have an important opportunity to help their children navigate and understand the messages in the media environment. Conversations at home can encourage young people to question the messages they see, consider potential risks, and make healthier and safer decisions. However, knowing when and how to start those conversations, and what to say when they happen, is not always easy for parents.

That’s the gap iRT aims to fill with the Media Ready Parent program.

Media Ready Parent takes a 21st-century approach to substance use prevention by giving parents practical strategies for talking with their middle school-aged children about media and substance use. Recently, iRT was awarded a new grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, to continue the development and rigorously evaluate the Media Ready Parent program.

Bringing Parents into the Prevention Equation

Led by iRT Senior Research Scientist Dr. Tracy Scull, a prototype of Media Ready Parent was developed as a self-paced, interactive online program that parents can access when and where it works for them. Rather than simply giving parents information about adolescent substance use, the program helps them build media literacy and communication skills they can use in everyday conversations with their children.

This approach and program also have applications to the implementation of a comprehensive community prevention strategy.

Schools, community antidrug coalitions, prevention organizations, and other community partners may already be reaching youth with prevention programming, but engaging parents and caregivers can be more challenging. Families have different schedules, responsibilities, and barriers that can make participation in traditional in-person programming difficult.

An accessible online program creates another way to bring parents into prevention efforts. Media Ready Parent has the potential to be used not only by individual families, but also as part of broader, comprehensive community prevention strategies that engage youth across the different environments that influence their health. For example, a community implementing school-based substance use prevention programming could offer Media Ready Parent as a complementary resource to families, extending prevention beyond the classroom and helping reinforce healthy messages and skills at home.

Building on Promising Early Research

The new project builds on iRT’s previous development and feasibility testing of Media Ready Parent. Early research demonstrated the feasibility of parents completing the program and showed promising results related to improved parent-adolescent communication.

With this new funding, the iRT research team will further develop the program with input from parents and community prevention and addiction specialists. Based upon input from stakeholder groups, new features may include tailored, just-in-time reminders designed to help busy parents put what they’ve learned into practice.

Once the program has been iteratively developed, iRT researchers will conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for improving parent-adolescent communication about media and substances, increasing more realistic beliefs about media and substance use, and decreasing adolescent substance use intentions and behaviors.

A New Tool for Families and Communities

Ultimately, the goal of the project is to create an engaging, flexible, evidence-based program that makes it easier for parents to play an active role in substance use prevention.

Because Media Ready Parent will be accessible from a range of devices including phones, tablets, or computers, it will also has the potential to give schools and other organizations readily scalable way to incorporate parent education and engagement into their broader prevention initiatives.

By equipping parents with practical skills they can use during everyday conversations, Media Ready Parent aims to help prevention efforts reach beyond a single lesson, curriculum, or setting by giving young people consistent support from their media literate parents, as they encounter risky or unhealthy media messages and are faced with making health-related decisions.

Stay tuned as we continue the development and evaluation of Media Ready Parent and share more about opportunities to bring the program to families and communities.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute On Alcohol Abuse And Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44AA033865. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.