Parental Monitoring, Peer Victimization, Academic Motivation, and Latino Adolescents’ Involvement with Drugs

Marijuana use leads to the use of other drugs, suspension or expulsion from school, lower educational attainment, unstable employment, and incarceration (Jacobus, et al., 2009). Alarmingly, Latino lifetime marijuana use is much higher than other ethnic groups (Johnston, et al., 2009). Due to their rapid growth in the U.S., research on the factors affecting Latino marijuana use is particularly important to prevention efforts to reduce health disparities. Parental monitoring has been consistently associated with lower rates of use among Latino youth (Crano et al., 2008). However, most studies focus on mother’s monitoring to the exclusion of father’s role, and typically study only one aspect of use (e.g., past 30-day, lifetime prevalence). Peer victimization and poor academic performance are less studied but have been associated with increased use as a way of coping (Bryant et al., 2003; Duran et al., 2013). The current study examines how mother and father monitoring (MM and FM; Plunkett et al., 2003) and peer victimization (PV; Champion et al., 2007) and academic performance (AM; Plunkett et al., 2003) are differentially associated with whether or not marijuana was used within the past six months and among those who have used, the frequency of use.

Data were collected from 645 Latino youth with a mean age of 14.9; 55.3% were female; and 65.6% were from intact families. Most were of Mexican descent (57%) with 18.6% being 1^st generation, 73% 2^nd generation, and 8% 3^rd generation. To account for large percentage of youth who had never used and to model both the probability of having use reported as an Odds Ratio (OR) and the frequency of use among users reported as an Incident Rate Ratio (IRR), we modeled marijuana use as a zero-inflated negative binomial distribution.

PV was significantly associated with an increase in the odds of having used in the past 6 months (OR=1.66), and AM, MM, and FM were all significantly associated with decreases in the odds of having used (OR=.55, .60, and .64, respectively). However, only FM was associated with a decrease in the frequency of use among users (IRR=.75).

Results suggest that youth may turn to marijuana use to cope with the experience of PV (i.e., bullying), and that AM, MM and FM each uniquely buffer against the probability of using. However, once youth have begun use, only fathers seem to be influential in abating that use. This suggests the importance of including fathers in prevention research and suggests different prevention strategies based on what stage of use is being targeted.