Additionally, parental alcohol abuse may contribute to poorer monitoring of adolescent behaviors. Parental monitoring helps establish an orderly structure whereby adolescents are more easily able to distinguish healthy from unhealthy choices pertaining to drinking, peer groups, and other forms of risky behavior, such as sexual activity. By decreasing monitoring activities, parental problem drinking may undermine healthy adolescent adjustment. Likewise, problem drinking also may provide lower levels of parental nurturing and emotional availability, thereby increasing the risk for adolescent drinking. In addition to affecting parenting skills adversely, problem drinking by parents may negatively affect child and adolescent development by impairing marital and family relations.
Marital conflict has a threatening and destabilizing influence on families.
Frequently, children in these families express concern both for the breakup of the family unit and for their prolonged safety. Prolonged marital conflict, influenced by parental alcohol use, may contribute to children s attempts to escape these adverse conditions through personal alcohol use with peers, who may be perceived as more emotionally supportive. Heightened levels of marital conflict also may contribute to spousal or child physical abuse and may undermine healthy family relations by producing financial strains. Ultimately, the disruptive effects of problem drinking on marital relations and family functioning may influence adolescents perceptions of how families typically function. Some adolescents may come to view the marital and family dysfunction they experience as normative.