Innovations in Reducing Health Disparities: Does Simply Involving Parents in Child’s Schoolingaaffect Adolescent Drug Use Among Latinos?

Introduction

One key barrier to the scale-up of school-based prevention programs is the lack of “buy in” from school administrators, teachers, and parents (Durlak et al., 2008; Redmond, et al., 2004). School administrators must balance the diverse needs of competing social programs with meeting academic benchmarks. As a result, prevention programs are often met with resistance resulting in fragmented and patchy implementation. Similarly, families are often difficult to recruit and retain in prevention programs (Frantz, et al., 2015), particularly when the program is not aligned with the families’ perceived needs (Gross et al., 2001). For example, universal parenting programs typically draw only about 33% of parents when offered in schools and that figure can fall to as low as 10% for ethnic families (Kumpfer, et al., 2002).

Research suggests many of the problem behaviors experienced by adolescents have common antecedents (e.g., Biglan, et a., 2012) suggesting the possibility of cross-over effects. Still, few studies have directly examined whether interventions focused on one outcome such as academic achievement will “spill over” into other domains and impact a different outcome such as substance use. The current study uses a multi-level modeling approach to test whether (1) either mother or father involvement in their child’s schooling is associated with reductions in substance using behavior among Latino adolescents; (2) a preponderance of mothers and, or fathers involved in their children’s schooling within a school can affect child substance use beyond the effect of individual-level mother and, or father involvement; and (3) these associations vary by gender.

Methods

Participants were Latino students from 12 urban schools in the Midwestern US (N = 631). Mean age was 13.14 years, 47% were female, and 95% qualified for free or reduced lunch. Mother and father involvement in school were each measured by four items that capture three types of parental involvement in schooling identified by Hill et al. (2009). Control variables for all analyses were parent education, fluency, and alcohol problems.

Results and Conclusions

Results suggest that individual level mother and father involvement in school are both positively associated with teens never having used alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana suggesting a spillover effect from one domain to another. Additionally, school level mother and father involvement in school were significantly associated with never having used alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana for girls but not boys. A significant school level quadratic term showed a tipping point at which a preponderance of parental involvement decreases onset of all substances beyond the effects of level-1 parental involvement. These findings hold important implications preventing substance use among youth whose parents are not involved at the individual level and for the scaling up of prevention programs. Implications and limitations are discussed.