Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use: An Exploration of Single-Parent Families PMC

Researchers have also questioned whether drugs used to treat ADHD (stimulants) may also increase the likelihood of adolescents developing a substance use disorder [71, 73, 74]. However, studies have generally found that stimulant drugs used as medications for the treatment of ADHD do not increase the likelihood that an adolescent will develop substance abuse or dependence [71, 73, 74]. Research, including a meta-analysis of six studies, has revealed that stimulant drugs prescribed for the treatment of ADHD may in fact reduce the risk of developing a substance use disorder by as much as 50% [71, 74].

Social Development Model

Although most work has not supported significant differences regarding peer susceptibility across biological sex among adults, when differences were noted, men were shown to be more similar and susceptible to their friends compared to women (Andrews et al., 2002). Clinicians and researchers have long observed that SUDs frequently affect multiple members within families over different generations. This scenario has been proven by many researchers on the effect of screen time on the mental health [60] that leads to the substance use among the adolescent due to the ubiquity of pro-substance use content on the internet. Adolescent with comorbidity who needs medical pain management by opioids also tend to misuse in future. A qualitative exploration on the perspectives among general practitioners concerning the risk of opioid misuse in people with pain, showed pain management by opioids is a default treatment and misuse is not a main problem for the them [61]. A careful decision on the use of opioids as a pain management should be consider among the adolescents and their understanding is needed.

Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use: An Exploration of Single-Parent Families

Modification of risk and protective factors may ameliorate harms from substance abuse prior to birth, and continue through to young adulthood. This paper has addressed some prevalent familial, social, and individual risk factors for adolescent substance use. Through the course of this paper, several areas that may require further research have become apparent. First, though some data exist regarding the effects of emotional abuse on adolescent substance use, the strength of research is lacking when compared to that of physical and sexual abuse. Though physical and sexual abuse have been more directly linked to risk for substance use, the effects of emotional abuse (including witnessing violence) should not be overlooked. Secondly, much of the literature focuses exclusively on factors leading to the use of cigarettes and alcohol, especially when discussing peer influences [48, 52, 53].

Risk and protective factors of drug abuse among adolescents: a systematic review

Overall, psychosocial risk and protective factors during this key developmental period represent important contributors in the initiation of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana use. An exciting challenge is to gain a greater understanding of youth’s motivation to engage in certain behaviors and how to harness adolescents’ flexibility in cognitive engagement away from unhealthy behaviors and promote opportunities for learning and motivations towards health. Prior work offers some evidence that differences in terms of the role of parental control and warmth on substance use may differ across biological sex. Gender development theory indicates that relationships with parents are more salient for girls compared to males (Gilligan, 1982) and thereby girls’ substance use may be more susceptible to parental influences than that of boys. For example, prior work finds that not only are girls more highly monitored by parents compared to boys (Hemovich et al., 2011), but the role of deviant peers on subsequent drug use among girls is greater in the context of low parental monitoring compared to boys (Ryan, Roman, & Okwany, 2015; Svensson, 2003). Similarly, prior work indicates that relationship quality (especially mother-daughter ties) played a stronger role on girls’ alcohol use compared to boys’ alcohol use (Kelly et al., 2011).

• Consistent with bioecological theories, peers and parents tend to have the strongest effect on adolescent substance use behavior.
• It is also more likely that females’ relationship with their parents or conflict within the home will be linked to their choice to use substances than males’ [44–46].
• Participants were sourced from rehabilitation centres in Pretoria, namely Staanvaas and Castle Carey Clinic, between September 2014 and June 2015, and were contacted upon ethical approval of the study.
• The proportional odds assumptions were assessed using a full likelihood ratio test comparing the fitted model to a model with varying location parameters where p-values greater than 0.05 are considered acceptable.

Finally, legal legislation and enforcement against drug abuse should be engaged with regularly as part of our commitment to combat this public health burden. The protective factors include high self-esteem, religiosity, grit, peer factors, self-control, parental monitoring, academic competence, anti-drug use policies, and strong neighborhood attachment [10,11,12,13,14,15]. The study of risk and protective family management risk and protective factors for adolescent substance use is projected to support evidence based treatment and intervention programmes by policy makers. Treatment and intervention programmes and studies should account for the patterns of risk elements in different cultures and social groups in society [11, 13]. Such programmes can be founded based on the social development model, which is a theory of causation and prevention, and an important prerequisite to an intervention strategy seeking to mitigate risk factors, while at the same time enhancing protective factors [5].

These results are largely explained by what is known as the same-sex hypothesis, which holds that children of the same sex as their single parent are less likely to experience socioemotional disadvantage than children raised by a parent of the opposite sex (Santrock and Warshak, 1979; Warshak, 1992). Such research may explain the results of Camara and Resnick (1989), who found that boys in mother-only homes and girls in father-only homes exhibited more aggressiveness and lower overall self-esteem. Similar to other contextual factors, there are mixed findings with regard to the role of neighborhood social processes on adolescent substance use. The authors speculate that these contradictory findings may be due to rates of substance use among adults in the community or failure in condemning substance use among youth. That is, adolescent substance use may be elevated if youth feel connected to individuals in their community who either approve of or use substances, consistent with Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977). Parents may feel less of an onus to closely supervise their children if they feel shared responsibility with other adult community members within neighborhoods high in collective efficacy, thus increasing opportunities to engage in substance use behavior (Fagan et al., 2014).

• For instance, less parental discipline is instilled by fathers with alcohol use problems when compared to non-alcoholic fathers [38].
• Furthermore, the inclusion of gender differences in the family system influencing substance abuse and criminal conducts and of higher quality evidence, especially from low- and middle-income countries on effective interventions, to prevent and manage substance abuse among adolescents will be useful.
• These encompass biological sex, biological differences (e.g., genes, neurobiology), and temperament (i.e., heritable differences in emotional, motor, attentional, and self-regulation processes) among other innate factors.

This stage is characterized by a rapid change to a new social phase where individuals have greater freedom and less social control when compared to the experience during childhood [1]. Results from the ordinal logistic regression assessing the effect of parental substance use on adolescent substance use are presented in Table 3. When parental legal substance use was considered, there was a 13.7 and 9.26 decrease in adolescent illicit substance at the lowest parental legal substance use categories 1 and 2 respectively when compared with parental legal substance use category 6.

Building their addiction resistance gives them the best chance to navigate the hellscape of adolescence with healthy coping skills instead of turning to alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, tolerate distressing thoughts or feelings, or foster a sense of belonging with their peers. Exploratory data analysis was performed by cross tabulation of predictor and response variables and exploration of their teen drug abuse interrelations. Cumulative odds ordinal logistic multivariate regressions with proportional odds were run to determine the effects of family management and relation variables controlling for demographic and socio-economic characteristics on adolescent substance use. Modelling was first performed for each independent variable against adolescent alcohol, cannabis and other illicit substance use.

• The odds of using alcohol more frequently indicated a 1.8 times decrease in odds of using alcohol more frequently with each increase in the level of parental knowledge of adolescent activities.
• Therefore, any adolescent with negative personality traits should be monitored closely by providing health education, motivation, counselling, and emotional support since it can be concluded that negative personality traits are correlated with high risk behaviours such as drug abuse [52].
• Investigations focused on understanding how neighborhood factors affect substance use differently across biological sex and age are limited.
• Moreover, even though the studies presented are European, the majority are conducted in the United States, probably because of the high rates of criminality and risky behaviors compared with other countries.

• The final model significantly explained maternal employment status over and above the intercept-only model.
• Background variables (or socio-economic variables) such as ethnicity, gender, parental education, parental marital status and income / socioeconomic status have been shown to influence substance use and abuse [1].
• This aspect has however provoked a large quantity of research on children’s perceptions of parental behaviour [17].