Relative Importance of Caregiver Characteristics for Future Alcohol Consumption in Youth Involved with Child Welfare System

Background

Adolescents involved with the child welfare system are disproportionately at risk for underage drinking. Ample evidence highlights the importance of parental strategies to prevent adolescent alcohol use; parent-targeting preventive interventions have been effective. Child welfare caregivers represent a promising demographic for caregiver-based interventions given systematic trainings and feedback caregivers receive from child welfare agencies. Such trainings may be expanded to include skill-building on alcohol risk prevention. However, little empirical evidence has informed interventions targeting child welfare caregivers to prevent alcohol consumption among adolescents involved with child welfare system.  

 

Methods

The present study addressed this gap by examining modifiable caregiver characteristics most predictive of future underage drinking in a cohort of adolescents in a nationally representative, prospective child welfare data set. The data source, National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being-II, is a longitudinal dataset containing information on a nationally representative sample of 5,872 children and families (Wave-I: 2008-2009; Wave-III: 36 months later) investigated by child protective services.  

The present study is the first to apply to the child welfare population the reputable Turrisi and Jaccard (2001) theoretical framework of familial processes affecting underage drinking. This model identifies four major classes of predictors: (a) Quality of relations between adolescent and parent/caregiver; (b) Communications between adolescent and parent/caregiver; (c) Parental/caregiver monitoring, and (d) Parent/caregiver's own alcohol consumption. We estimated relative impacts of these four classes of caregiver predictors using four composites of corresponding caregiver items from NSCAW data set. Source items included Wave-I caregiver characteristics reported by adolescents, except for caregiver alcohol use reported by caregivers.

We used collinearity-neutral relative importance analytic technique, dominance analyses, to examine distinct contributions of these four composites to the explained variance of future underage drinking. We then disaggregated predictive effects of the most important caregiver items from the above composites.

 

 

Results

The mean age of adolescents in our subsample at Wave-I was 14.5 years of age (SD=3.73), 49% of children were female, 23% identifying as Latinx; 38% identifying as White, 10% as African-American, and 6% as ‘other’.  Mean lifetime adolescent drinking at Wave-I was 0.94 (SD=1.5), and at Wave-III it was 1.02 (SD=1.6)

Our models explained a substantial portion of variance in future drinking: 42% for the four classes of caregiver predictors, and 35% for five disaggregated items most strongly predictive of drinking. The most consequential class of caregiver predictors was relational quality (60% of explained variance), followed by the extent of communications (26%). Caregiver monitoring accounted only for 3% of the explained variance. Among disaggregated items, caregiver's trustfulness and helpfulness, and communications about dating accounted for the bulk of explained variance. 

Findings highlight the importance of caregiver-adolescent relational quality and communications for predicting underage alcohol use, and downplay the role of caregiver monitoring.

 

Conclusions 

Child welfare service systems may help prevent underage drinking by systematically training and motivating caregivers to foster trusting, helping relationships and regular communications with the adolescents in their care.