January is Parents Empowered Month in Utah, marking 13 years of spotlighting the state’s underage drinking prevention campaign, Parents Empowered, overseen by the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services (DABS). The initiative has been running for nearly two decades and is guided by a statewide workgroup of alcohol safety and prevention partners. Governor Spencer Cox described it as a long-term effort built on collaboration with parents and local coalitions, with the aim of supporting children’s health as they grow.

The focus of Parents Empowered Month is simple and practical: encourage parents to start conversations early, especially with children aged 9 to 13, and to stay involved as kids get older. The campaign highlights how underage drinking can interfere with brain development and increase the risk of addiction later in life. It also points to research showing that young people who start drinking before age 15 are four times more likely to become alcohol-dependent than those who wait until age 21.

The 2025 Parents Empowered annual report shows how Utah has leaned on evidence-based prevention messaging and wide outreach. It highlights three key parenting strategies, bonding, boundaries, and monitoring, and a central message that parental disapproval of underage drinking needs to be clear and strong (“very wrong” rather than “just wrong”). The report also describes the campaign’s scale, including 259.4 million total impressions across platforms, more than 199,000 website visits, and a network of community mobilization projects across the state.

Alongside statewide media, the report describes local activations funded through community grants, where 19 communities installed prevention messaging and reached an estimated 2 million Utahns. These included partnerships at large public venues, like Lagoon amusement park, where a digital family game logged over 6,500 sessions and hundreds of prizes redeemed. The broader prevention picture also looks positive: Utah continues to report some of the lowest youth alcohol use rates in the nation, and the recently released 2025 SHARP survey data cited in the January 2026 announcement reports that only 3.8% of Utah students drank alcohol in the past 30 days, compared to 12.5% nationally.

Find more from Parents Empowered (USA, January 2026)