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| Parents in the Dark About Teens' Drinking and Drugging |
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ST. LOUIS, Sept. 25 -- Asking parents about adolescents' substance use and abuse is essentially a waste of time, found a research team.
About half of parents surveyed knew that their teens smoked, or used alcohol or marijuana, but only a handful know when that use had crossed the line into abuse or dependence, reported psychiatrist Laura J. Bierut, M.D., of Washington University here and colleagues at three other centers.
After surveying 591 adolescents and at least one parent of each teen, Dr. Bierut and colleagues concluded in the October issue of Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research that parental reports added only minimal information about adolescent substance use.
She recommended that "investigators could save time and resources by limiting the number of questions asked of parents so that only basic information regarding substance use is obtained, or by omitting parent reports about substance use altogether, particularly for older adolescents."
More than half of the teens (54.4%) said they had consumed at least one drink of alcohol and 23.6% told Dr. Bierut and her colleagues of at least one bout of intoxication. By their parents' reckoning, however, the teens' lifetime alcohol use was 30.5% and the intoxication rate was 8.1%.
Based on their responses to the child version of the Semi-Structure Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism questionnaire, 8.5% of the adolescents surveyed met the diagnosis for alcohol abuse or dependence. But parents who answered the parent version of the survey identified alcohol use or dependence in just 3%.
The disconnect was similar for rates of marijuana use and for use of other drugs. Parents were more aware of cigarette smoking, probably because cigarette smoking is "a repeated behavior likely to be noticed by parents."
Parents who had a personal history of substance abuse or dependence were better at spotting problems with their offspring, but this adult group was also more likely to see signs or abuse or dependence in children who denied it.
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