The Outcomes of an Alcohol Prevention Program on Parents’ Rule Setting and Self-efficacy: a Bidirectional Model

Abstract

Most adolescents have their first encounter with alcohol in early or middle adolescence. Parents' rule setting about alcohol has been shown to be important to delay the onset and reduce the frequency of adolescents' alcohol drinking, but less is known about the potential role of parents' beliefs about their competence in and ability to influence their adolescents' drinking habits (i.e., parental self-efficacy [PSE], Bandura (Psychological Review, 84, 191-215, 1977). In this study, we examined the direction of influence between parents' rule setting and PSE as outcomes of the program "Prevention of Alcohol use in Students" (PAS), a prevention program aiming to reduce underage drinking by targeting parents and adolescents both separately and in a combined intervention. We tested two mediation processes in which the program would (a) have a direct effect on PSE, which in turn would increase parents' rule setting or (b) have a direct effect on parents' rule setting, which in turn would increase PSE. To examine these processes, we used a sample of 2562 parent-adolescent dyads (age 12 at baseline), followed annually over 3 years. The results showed that the combined intervention increased PSE via an increase in parents' rule setting. No significant effect of the intervention on rules about alcohol via PSE was found. This is the first study to test the mediation processes involving PSE and parental rule setting in an experimental context where parenting practices are being actively changed. The results suggest that giving parents concrete advice on how to deal with alcohol drinking in their adolescents and at the same time helping adolescents to develop healthy attitudes about alcohol drinking have a positive influence on parents' self-efficacy.

The Enduring Impact of Parents’ Monitoring, Warmth, Expectancies, and Alcohol Use on Their Children’s Future Binge Drinking and Arrests: a Longitudinal Analysis

“…Glatz and Koning’s (2015) recent experimental intervention study assessed the efficacy of enhancing parent competence for preventing adolescent drinking habits. Their intervention was designed to alter positive parental perceptions of self-efficacy via concrete household guidelines and rule setting.…”

Adolescent Alcohol Use: Protective and Predictive Parent, Peer, and Self-Related Factors

“…As parenting factors revealed strong relationships with both self-image and one’s peer group for 8th and 10th graders, parent-targeted interventions would seem a worthwhile endeavor for preventing alcohol use by younger adolescents. Building on previous research (Gottfredson and Hussong 2011; Pilgrim et al 2006; Siegel et al 2015), interventions focused on increasing parental involvement in their child’s school and personal life, with an added emphasis on enhancing parent-child alcohol communication (Glatz and Koning 2016), could enhance youth’s self-esteem and decrease their likelihood of associating with deviant peers and reduce the incidence of alcohol initiation. Previous efforts have found that addressing parents (vs. children) in persuasive attempts resulted in less resistance and greater message acceptance by adolescents (Crano et al 2007).…”

Internet-Based Universal Prevention for Students and Parents to Prevent Alcohol and Cannabis Use Among Adolescents: Protocol for the Randomized Controlled Trial of Climate Schools Plus

“…Data regarding parental self-efficacy will be collected by a 3-item scale measuring parents’ confidence in their ability to prevent their adolescent from drinking alcohol, in which higher scores indicate a greater sense of self-efficacy [41]; this has been used and validated in the past PAS studies [42,43]. …”

“…Students will also be asked to complete the Kessler 6 scale [47] to assess psychological distress in the past 30 days, and their quality of life will be measured by the Child Health Utility 9D scale [48]. Finally, students’ self-control will be measured using a 13-item scale developed by Tangney et al [49], which was used in the PAS program [32,33,42] and which includes questions such as “I am good at resisting temptation , ” in which students would be asked to indicate how they typically are on a 5-point scale from “Not at all” to “Very Much.” These additional measures will be assessed at baseline and 12- and 24-month follow-up.…”

“…The questionnaires contain scales used in previous Climate Schools trials, as well as specific parenting scales from the APSALS survey [44] and scales used to evaluate the effectiveness of the PAS program [42]. …”