Are parents’ beliefs about substance use risks associated with their adolescent’s substance use?

<p>Although specific parenting behaviors have been identified as protective factors for adolescent substance use (SU), the relationship between parents’ beliefs about the risks associated with SU and their adolescent’s SU remains unclear. Associations between parental characteristics and adolescent SU may reflect both environmental and genetic influences. Using data from a prospective longitudinal adoption study, we investigated whether parents’ substance-related risk perceptions when their adolescent was 15 years old predicted adolescent SU frequency at age 18, whether parents’ lifetime history of problematic SU predicted their risk perceptions and indirectly predicted adolescent SU, and whether these associations differed by biological relatedness. The sample included 432 parent-adolescent dyads (53.0% of adolescents were male and 58.6% were White), of whom 324 were not biologically related. We hypothesized that greater perceived risk would predict less frequent adolescent SU and that associations would be stronger among biologically related dyads. Contrary to hypotheses, parents’ alcohol- and cannabis-related risk perceptions did not predict adolescents’ subsequent alcohol or cannabis use frequency, and biological relatedness did not moderate these associations. Parents with a lifetime history of problematic SU perceived less risk associated with cannabis use, but there was no significant indirect association with adolescent cannabis use. By leveraging an adoption design to distinguish shared genetic from environmental influences, these findings suggest that parents’ substance-related risk perceptions alone may have limited influence on adolescent SU and that more proximal parenting behaviors may be important prevention targets.</p>