4 research outputs found
Parenting mechanisms in links between parentsâ and adolescentsâ alcohol use behaviors
Background: Adolescence has been identified as a critical period with regard to the initiation and early escalation of alcohol use. Moreover, research on familial risk and protective processes provides independent support for multiple domains of parental influence on adolescent drinking; including parentsâ own drinking behaviors, as well as the practices they employ to socialize their children. Despite this prevalence of findings, whether and how these distinct associations are related to one another is still not entirely clear.
Methods: The present study used data from 4,731 adolescents and their parents to test the nature of associations between (a) parentsâ frequencies of alcohol use and intoxication, and lifetime alcoholârelated problems, (b) adolescentsâ perceptions of the parenting that they receive, and (c) adolescentsâ prevalence of alcohol use and intoxication at 14 and 17½âyears of age. As such, multiple mediation modeling was used to assess whether parental alcohol use behaviors influence adolescent alcohol use directly, or if they operate through indirect associations with various aspects of parenting that subsequently influence adolescent use.
Results: Examination of simple associations demonstrated that maternal and paternal alcohol use behaviors were positively linked with adolescent use behaviors at 14 and 17½âyears of age. Likewise, several parenting behaviors were independently associated with both parental and adolescent drinking. Examined collectively, multivariate path analyses indicated that associations between parentsâ and adolescentsâ alcoholârelated behaviors were mediated, in part, by adolescentsâ perceptions of the parenting that they received, especially at 14âyears of age. Furthermore, perceived parental monitoring and discipline had unique mediating capabilities, net the effects of all other parenting behaviors.
Conclusions: This study demonstrates that parenting is an important mediator of the association between parental and adolescent drinking practices. An important area for future research will be to study how adolescents can avoid alcoholârelated problems despite being reared within a risk laden parenting environment and/or having parents who drink frequently.peerReviewe
CHRM2, parental monitoring, and adolescent externalizing behavior: eidence for gene-environment interaction
Psychologists, with their long-standing tradition of studying mechanistic processes, can make important contributions to further characterizing the risk associated with genes identified as influencing risk for psychiatric disorders. We report one such effort with respect to CHRM2, which codes for the cholinergic muscarinic 2 receptor and was of interest originally for its association with alcohol dependence. We tested for association between CHRM2 and prospectively measured externalizing behavior in a longitudinal, community-based sample of adolescents, as well as for moderation of this association by parental monitoring. We found evidence for an interaction in which the association between the genotype and externalizing behavior was stronger in environments with lower parental monitoring. There was also suggestion of a crossover effect, in which the genotype associated with the highest levels of externalizing behavior under low parental monitoring had the lowest levels of externalizing behavior at the extreme high end of parental monitoring. The difficulties involved in distinguishing mechanisms of gene-environment interaction are discussed