Parenting mechanisms in links between parents' and adolescents' 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 parents’ 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) parents’ frequencies of alcohol use and intoxication, and lifetime alcohol‐related problems, (b) adolescents’ perceptions of the parenting that they receive, and (c) adolescents’ prevalence of alcohol use and intoxication at 14 and 17½ years 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 17½ years of age. Likewise, several parenting behaviors were independently associated with both parental and adolescent drinking. Examined collectively, multivariate path analyses indicated that associations between parents’ and adolescents’ alcohol‐related behaviors were mediated, in part, by adolescents’ perceptions of the parenting that they received, especially at 14 years 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 alcohol‐related problems despite being reared within a risk laden parenting environment and/or having parents who drink frequently.