Purpose and Nature of the Report

• Following a steady decline in the use of marijuana by young people in the US throughout the 1980s, use increased sharply beginning in the early 1990s. The causes for this increase remain to be understood.

• This report had two major aims: 1) A major aim was to test the hypothesis that the increase in marijuana use by recent generations of young people was due to the fact that their parents were members of the baby boom generation. These parents belonged to cohorts who became heavily involved in using marijuana, and who, because of their adolescent experience, may have unintentionally facilitated the use of marijuana by their children. 2) A second aim was to assess the extent of parental influence on children's marijuana use, irrespective of membership in the baby boom cohorts.

• The analyses took advantage of the inclusion of multiple respondents per household in the National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse, a series of repeated national cross-sectional surveys of the population aged 12 and older. Clustering provided samples of parent and child dyads drawn from the same households.

• The analyses were based on 9,463 dyads composed of one parent (mother or father) and one child aged 12 to 25 per household from 10 surveys conducted from 1979 to 1996.

• Descriptive, multivariate logistic regression analyses, and a limited number of structural equation models were estimated.

• Five periods of the marijuana epidemic from 1963 to 1996 were identified in terms of marijuana use incidence and prevalence. Birth cohorts were characterized by type of exposure to the epidemic experienced at ages 15-18, the years of highest risk for involvement in marijuana. Nine groups of cohorts with different types of exposure were identified.

• Based on drug use reports provided independently by parents and children, the association in marijuana use between parents and children was assessed as a function of parental exposure to different periods of the marijuana epidemic.

• Predictors of the children's marijuana use other than parental marijuana use and parental birth cohort were also examined. These factors included sociodemographic characteristics, behavioral and attitudinal characteristics of parent and child, including parental use of drugs other than marijuana, and parent and child marijuana related attitudes and delinquency.

Results

• Parental membership in the baby boom generation (1946-1964 birth cohorts) did not account for the differential rates of children's marijuana use.

• Lifetime marijuana use rates among parents of youths and young adults approximately doubled from 1979 to 1994, reflecting the increasing dominance of the baby boom cohort among parents. However, most of this increase occurred during the 1980's, a period in which youth and young adult drug use rates were declining.

• During the period of rapid increase in youth marijuana use (1992 to 1995), the percent of parents who were baby boomers or who had ever used marijuana did not change enough to have been a major factor in the youth increase.

• Parental lifetime and last year marijuana use increased the risk that a child would ever use marijuana. Controlling for parent and child sociodemographic characteristics, the children of parents who ever used marijuana were about three times as likely to have ever used marijuana as the children of parents who never used the drug. With additional control for attitudinal and behavioral characteristics, the risk declined to about two.

• Parents who stopped using marijuana and those who were currently using marijuana had children who used marijuana at similar rates. This suggests that parental influence does not reflect imitation of the parent by the child but the effect of the parent having chosen to become a marijuana user.

• The influence of parental marijuana use on child lifetime marijuana use was similar for mothers and fathers, and sons and daughters.

• Parental influence on child marijuana use did not vary among racial/ethnic groups, after controlling for parent and child characteristics.

• Parental use of cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine each independently increased the risk that a child will use marijuana over and beyond the influence of parental use of marijuana.

• Parents who perceived little risk associated with marijuana use had children with similar beliefs. In addition, parental attitudes had an indirect effect on the child's use through the child's own attitudes.

• Adolescent attitudes had the strongest association with adolescent marijuana use of any of the three adolescent characteristics that were examined. Adolescents who perceived no risk or slight risk in occasional marijuana were twelve times more likely to have used marijuana in the last year than adolescents who perceived great risk.

• The association between adolescent marijuana use and attitudes about the lack of harm associated with marijuana use was five times as strong as the association between adolescent and parental use.

• Adolescent delinquency had a strong association with adolescent marijuana use and attitudes about the lack of harm associated with marijuana use.

• The association between adolescent delinquency and marijuana use was four times as strong as the association between adolescent and parental use.

• Adolescents who dropped out of school were significantly more likely to use marijuana than non-dropouts.

• Externalizing behavioral problems (e.g., aggression, delinquency) were more strongly associated with adolescent marijuana use than were internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety, depression).

• Sociodemographic characteristics, including ethnicity, parental education and marital status, were weakly associated with adolescent marijuana use.

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