Effects of automatic and explicit parenting on adolescents’ alcohol use

© 2022 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.Commonly, parenting behaviors are assessed in an explicit way, usually by means of self-reports. Yet under suboptimal conditions, it is expected that parents act more automatically. The aim of the present longitudinal empirical study was to investigate the influence of automatic and explicit parenting cognitions on alcohol use in adolescents and whether this relationship is dependent on adolescents’ age and gender and parent gender. A sample of 111 parent-child dyads (71.9% mothers; M age = 47.4, SD = 5.3) with children between 12 and 18 years old (55.2% boys; M age = 14.8 years, SD = 1.6) completed the Relational Responding Task (RRT) at T1 (September 2015) and T2 (April 2016) to assess automatic parenting prior to an online questionnaire that assessed explicit alcohol-specific parenting. For lifetime prevalence of drinking, stricter explicit parenting cognitions predicted a lower likelihood of children ever having consumed alcohol at T2. This effect was particularly relevant for older adolescents. Automatic parenting cognitions were not predictive of the lifetime prevalence of alcohol use. For weekly drinking, a significant protective effect of stricter automatic parenting cognitions was found only for older adolescents. This study is the first to demonstrate longitudinally that automatic parenting cognitions as measured by the RRT can be used as a predictor of the level of drinking among older adolescents, even after controlling for explicit parenting behaviors. We argue that the influence of parents is subject to change as a function of adolescents’ age, with the prevailing role of automatic parenting over explicit parenting.