Parenting Styles and Adolescent Drug Use Behaviours

Abstract

This study hypothesizes that parental style is related to drug use behaviour of adolescents. The data were obtained from a large prospective longitudinal research project on lifestyle and drug use in Oslo, Norway. The analyses are based on a sample of 846 adolescents, with an age span of 15-20 years. The parenting style was measured by means of a shortened version of Parenting Bonding Instrument, where the respondents assessed their perceptions of their parents' behaviour at the time they were growing up. The instrument measures two subdimensions labelled care and protection, which combine to four broad styles of parenting. Using canonical correlation analyses, it was found that the combination of a low level of caring and a high level of protection, conceptualized as `affectionless control', was associated with drug use among the adolescents. Similar patterns emerged from separate analyses of the father and the mother scales. These support the hypothesis that the parenting styles of the mother and father are related to their children's drug use.