Kelly E Knight Intergenerational Continuity of Substance Use

Abstract

This study examines whether parental marijuana use that occurs during the life of a child impacts patterns of continuity and discontinuity in adolescent substance use among father-child dyads. The study uses data from 263 father-child-mother triads involved in the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS) and the Rochester Intergenerational Study (RIGS). We use a dual trajectory model to examine the research questions. Results suggest that both paternal and maternal marijuana use during the child's life increase the probability that a child will follow a moderate or high substance use trajectory during adolescence, beyond the risk incurred from paternal adolescent history of substance use. Some nuances related to the timing of concurrent parental marijuana use emerge across parent sex. The results highlight the important role of both caregivers in the explanation of patterns of discontinuity across generations, as well as the relevance of considering when the use occurred.

Notes

1. Reviews of this research conclude that exposure to parental substance use (i.e., concurrent use) increases the risk for use among offspring, regardless of survey design (i.e., cross-sectional, retrospective reports versus prospective, longitudinal data; e.g., Rossow et al. 2016; Ryan et al. 2010). Notably, this similarity in behavior is not limited to the use of the same substance; rather, any one type of substance use by a parent increases the risk for alcohol, marijuana, and other drug use among offspring often as a result of co-morbidity between substances used by parents (Hawkins et al. 1992; Li et al. 2002).

2. Knight et al. (2014) included a distinction for the time of use, but it was contingent on the parent's own age, which does not necessarily correspond with a child's developmental stage.

3. A total of 73 children had less than two observations between ages 14 and 18, in most cases due to their younger ages. From those who had the requisite data, 13 did not have a biological mother involved in the study, and 4 did not have any information about paternal and maternal marijuana use between the ages analyzed.

4. Due to the nature of data collection (start year of 1999 and first-born average age of 6 in this year), numerous triads were missing information on parental marijuana use prior to this age. Thus, we decided not to include information of parental marijuana use before age 7. The measure was created using all information available between ages 7 and 17, but over 80% of the parents have information in most (over 70%) of the yearly measures.

5. We evaluated the trajectory solutions using the range of parameters suggested by Nagin (2005): the odds of correct classification for each group exceeds 5; the mixture probabilities are close to the percentage of the sample hard classified to each group; and the 95% confidence intervals for the mixture probabilities are reasonably narrow. All these indicators suggest that the models adequately represent the sample (see Table S2 in the Supplemental material). We also note that in each of our trajectory groups, the mean conditional posterior probability exceeds 0.98, suggesting a judicious model (Roeder et al. 1999).

6. Although a 4-group solution has a lower BIC for father's and child's substance use, in each case, two of the groups have less than 30 individuals. See Table S3 in the Supplemental material.

7. As an anonymous reviewer pointed to, trajectory groups are estimated within each generation and, as such, "resilience" may be just reflecting population-level declines in substance use among recent generations, and not individual-level resilience. The results for both generations are relatively similar in terms of patterns: an abstainer/experimental group, a moderate-user group, and a high-level group, with two primary differences: first, the amount of use similarly differs between like groups across generations (as reported in Table 1), and second, the probability of the groups changes between the two generations. Importantly, the higher proportion of G3s in the low-use group (68%) compared to G2s in a low-use group (63%) is reflective of the secular change across generations, for which our analytic strategy is able to directly account, as we focus on these patterns for continuity and discontinuity. Recognizing this fact, we retain the language "resilience" to be consistent with prior IG research (e.g., Thornberry 2016; Thornberry et al. 2018).

8. We made an a priori decision that to count as a valid measure for concurrent use, the parent must be observed for at least eight periods during G3 ages 7 through 17 (i.e., 70% of the available measures). For fathers, there are 39 individuals who are observed for seven or fewer periods (of 11). Of these 39, 21 report marijuana use in at least one of the periods, which means we can confidently classify them as engaging in concurrent use (i.e., the concurrent use risk factor is coded as a 1). This leaves 18 fathers who both fail the restriction and report no use when observed and we cannot confidently assign a risk factor value. Similarly, there are 21 mothers who are observed seven or fewer periods between G3 ages seven and 17. Of these 21, three report use in at least one period and can be classified as engaging in concurrent marijuana use. This leaves 18 mothers who both fail the restriction and report no use when observed.

9. Alternatively, one option to retain these cases and deal with the problems of missing data would be to impute data for the missing time points. We decided against doing this given that the limited number of missing cases coupled with risk factor being binary, which might yield unstable estimates in certain cells.

10. For the time-specific models (i.e., risk factor measured between ages 7 and 13, and ages 14 and 17), parents with missing data were also recorded as 0 or 1 for the lower and upper bound estimate, respectively.

11. For example, in the case of our data, 20% of the fathers had limited contact with their G3 child during their lives.

12. The analyses were also estimated with an overall measure of illegal substance use. However, the prevalence of illegal substances other than marijuana was extremely low (none of the mothers and only 2% of the fathers who did not report marijuana reported other illicit drug use throughout the child's life), and, therefore, the results were largely driven by marijuana use.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Daniel S. Nagin, and our anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments.

Funding

Support for the Rochester Youth Development Study has been provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (R01CE001572), the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2006-JW-BX-0074, 86-JN-CX-0007, 96-MU-FX-0014, 2004-MU-FX-0062), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA020195, R01DA005512), the National Science Foundation (SBR-9123299), and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH56486, R01MH63386). Work on this project was also aided by grants to the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany from NICHD (P30HD32041) and NSF (SBR-9512290).

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile: Millennium Nucleus for the Study of the Life Course and Vulnerability (MLIV), Avenida Vicuna Mackenna, 4860, Santiago, Chile

   Pilar Larroulet

2. Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

   Thomas A. Loughran

3. University of Texas-San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

   Megan B. Augustyn

4. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

   Terence P. Thornberry

5. University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

   Terence P. Thornberry

6. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

   Kimberly L. Henry

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pilar Larroulet.

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Larroulet, P., Loughran, T.A., Augustyn, M.B. et al. Intergenerational Continuity and Discontinuity in Substance Use: the Role of Concurrent Parental Marijuana Use. J Dev Life Course Criminology 7, 127–150 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-021-00159-7

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• Received: 28 December 2019

• Revised: 15 December 2020

• Accepted: 05 January 2021

• Published: 12 February 2021

• Issue Date: June 2021

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-021-00159-7

Keywords

• Intergenerational substance use
• Intergenerational discontinuity
• Group-based trajectory models
• Marijuana use
• Adolescent substance use

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