Parental supervision and alcohol use in adolescence: developmentally specific interactions.

Parental supervision practices with adolescents are thought to be highly relevant to the development of alcohol use in adolescence.1 In early adolescence, adolescents have increasing and highly variable alcohol use. Using data from multiple surveys,2 meta-analyses indicated that the proportion of adolescents with any use in the past 30 days doubles from approximately 20% for eighth graders (i.e., age 13 ± 1 years) to approximately 40% 2 years later. Binge drinking in the past 2 weeks, defined as the consumption of five or more drinks on one occasion, was reported by approximately 12% of eighth graders and approximately 24% of 10th graders. Despite widespread preventive efforts, these estimates have remained stable in recent years.2 While heritable factors likely play some role, environmental influences are the predominant factor determining early adolescent alcohol use trajectories.3 For example, in a large adolescent sample (N = 3744) including monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, biological siblings, and adoptive siblings, environmental effects accounted for significant variance in adolescent alcohol use while genetic factors did not.4 Parenting behaviors are typically cited as among the most important environmental influences on alcohol use during this age period.5 In community adolescent samples, more parental supervision has been associated with less alcohol involvement.6–8 Inadequate supervision has been shown to predict alcohol use disorders in community-recruited adolescents.9 The parental task of supervising an adolescent differs from the analogous task of supervising a younger child. For younger children, supervision necessarily involves direct observation. By contrast, direct parental observation plays a diminishing role in supervision over the course of adolescence.10 This less direct supervision that occurs during adolescence involves ongoing communication between parents and adolescents about the adolescents’ whereabouts, peers present, their schedule to return home, and contact information enabling parents to directly communicate with adolescents. Supervision of adolescents, by this definition, has been found to be comprised of a unidimensional construct that correlates with communication and emotional support and prospectively predicts alcohol use disorders.11 We note that some scholars refer to this form of supervision as parental monitoring, reserving the term supervision to direct observation.10 These terminologies essentially acknowledge that, in order for parental attempts to supervise an adolescent to be effective, active participation of the adolescent is necessary. Honest communication between the adolescent and parents is necessary for effective supervision to occur.12,13 Parents may have limited awareness or inaccurate assessments of their adolescent’s alcohol use. In a study including approximately 20,000 parent-adolescent dyads,14 mothers of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 showed a strong tendency to underestimate their adolescent’s alcohol use. The tendency of parents to underestimate their adolescent’s alcohol use has also been specifically documented in the early adolescent period.15 Among high school students who reported engaging in specific drinking behaviors over the previous 12 months, only approximately one third of parents were aware that these behaviors had occurred.16 Among adolescents with alcohol use disorders,17 parent interviews indicated that only 27% confirmed the diagnosis. These data clearly document that adolescents do not openly share information about their alcohol use with their parents. Adolescents engaged in alcohol use may actively subvert parents’ attempts to provide supervision. Psychological dysregulation may be a trait evident in childhood influencing parenting practices and predicting later alcohol use. Children with difficulties regulating behavior and emotions have been described as having a difficult temperament18 or psychological dysregulation.5 From infancy through adolescence, a child’s psychological dysregulation may interact with a parent’s personality characteristics to provoke or exacerbate problematic parenting behaviors.19,20 Children perceived as having a difficult temperament by their parents are more likely to be emotionally neglected,21 suggesting that some parents adapt to difficult children by disengagement. Childhood psychological dysregulation, operationalized as Neurobehavioral Disinhibition, has been shown to predict adolescent alcohol and drug involvement.22,23 In the context of the present research, these observations suggest that childhood psychological dysregulation may influence both parental supervision practices and the adolescent’s alcohol use. Parental supervision may be considered to have global as well as developmentally specific features. While parents may have general tendencies to be more or less involved in supervising their adolescents, the specific skills required for carrying out parental responsibilities change from late childhood through adolescence. Similarly, adolescents exhibit both a general propensity toward alcohol use and developmentally specific alcohol use behaviors. Recent developments in statistical modeling and related software facilitate the discrimination of these global and specific factors. Analogous to the state-trait model,24,25 a statistical model may be developed that considers global and developmentally specific characteristics as well as their interactions over time. Specifically, this approach allows the partitioning of a construct’s variance into a global factor that spans developmental states and developmental stage specific variability. We will call this the global-specific developmental model. In this model, alcohol use reported during a specific developmental stage is conceptualized as due to the influence of the global alcohol use factor, the previous alcohol use measurement (i.e., autoregressive carryover), stage-specific parental supervision, and unique sources of variation including measurement error.25 This method was expected to provide information about the relationship between parental supervision and adolescents’ alcohol use not typically evident in results using more conventional statistical approaches. In summary, the purpose of this study was to examine the interaction of parental supervision and offspring alcohol use from late childhood through middle adolescence. We hypothesized that higher supervision levels would correlate with lower alcohol use levels and that adolescents with higher levels of childhood psychological dysregulation and alcohol use would predict less effective parental supervision. In addition to taking childhood psychological dysregulation into consideration, the study uses a novel statistical modeling approach to distinguish effects of parental supervision and alcohol involvement that are global in nature from stage-specific effects within and across late childhood, early adolescence, and middle adolescence.