Parenting across Generations: Exploring the Influence of Maternal Parenting and Drinking on Emerging Adults' Mental Health and Parenting Practices

Background and Purpose: Social Learning theory suggests that parenting practices often transmit across generations as individuals tend to model the parenting they experienced. Also, prior studies have presented that living with parental substance use can shape children’s future parenting perspectives and practices. Particularly, maternal substance use and parenting have been shown to profoundly impact their children’s developmental outcomes and later mental health and substance use. To explore this intergenerational transmission, this study examines how maternal substance misuse and parenting practices are linked to emerging adults’ parenting practices through mental health and substance use.

Methods: The study employed multiple waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and its Child/Young Adult supplements (NLSCYA). This study sample included 397 emerging adults (EAs; aged 21–29) who met the following criteria: (1) they had at least one child aged 6 to 9, (2) they completed the NLSCYA survey in 2010, and (3) their mothers provided NLSY79 data when the EAs were 8 or 9 years old. EAs’ childhood experiences of maternal parenting were measured with seven types of practices: praising, showing physical affection, grounding, removing allowances, taking away privileges, time-out, and spanking. Maternal drinking was a binary variable measuring heavy use (=1) or none/rare use (=0) based on weekly frequency and quantity. EAs’ parenting was measured by the weekly frequency of behaviors mirroring their mothers’ parenting in childhood. The mediators were (1) EAs’ substance misuse (heavy = 1; none/rare = 0) of alcohol or marijuana, and (2) EA's depressive symptoms measured by the 11-item CES-D. Controlling for mothers’ and EAs’ sociodemographic factors, multiple mediation path analyses were conducted in Mplus Version 8.10.

Results: Maternal drinking behavior was not significantly associated with EAs’ substance misuse, depression, and parenting practices. However, several maternal parenting practices were significantly associated with EAs’ later parenting strategies. Experiencing spanking during childhood was negatively associated with how often EAs praised their children (β = –.138, p = .006). EAs exhibited more physical affection toward their children if they had received similar affection from their mothers (β = .121, p = .019) or had been grounded (β = –.133, p = .034). EAs’ experiencing time-out in childhood showed lower use of spanking later (β = –.057, p = .016). EAs’ depression levels were associated with their mother’s use of privilege removal (β = .163, p = .018) and spanking (β = –.104, p = .011) as disciplinary strategies with their children. Furthermore, EAs’ substance misuse was negatively associated with experiencing allowance removal during childhood (β = –.163, p = .040). However, no significant indirect effects were observed among these variables.

Conclusion and Implications: This study contributes to the understanding of the intergenerational transmission of parenting and the potential role of mental health in shaping parenting practices. This study highlights the complex nature of parenting across emotional support and disciplinary behaviors. Findings point to the need for further exploration of family and contextual factors to better understand the pathways linking parental substance misuse, mental health, and subsequent parenting practices.