With extreme rates of binge drinking among young adults, college students continue to be a primary focus for a range of alcohol prevention efforts. Most universities are attempting to change the alcohol environment by implementing a variety of strategies to reduce heavy drinking among college students. With the exception of parental notification policies, there have been relatively few strategies utilizing the role of parents in alcohol prevention programming. Guided by the constructs of the Health Belief Model, this paper presents an exploratory study of parent-child communication as a prevention strategy to reduce heavy drinking among first-year college students. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)