The transmission of emotion regulation from parent to adolescent as well as the relationship between adolescent emotion regulation and substance use is not clearly understood in extant psychological literature. The present study hypothesizes that parents transmit their emotion regulation skills to their adolescents via the mediator of parenting behaviors and that adolescents who are better emotion regulators are less likely to use substances. In the present study, cross-sectional and longitudinal structural equation modeling analyses were utilized to determine the relationship among these variables. In the cross-sectional analyses (n = 219), the sample was 55% male and were between the ages of 12 to 18 years (M = 15.12). In the longitudinal analyses (n = 129), the sample was 42% male and were between the ages of 13 to 21 years (M = 17.13). In both the cross-sectional and longitudinal models, adolescents with high negative parenting had higher levels of lability/negativity, whereas adolescents with high positive parenting had better emotion regulation skills and lower levels of substance use. In addition, in the longitudinal analyses, higher levels of suppression in parents were negatively related to adolescent emotion regulation. The findings of the present study highlight that parents transmit emotion regulation skills to their adolescents and that parenting behaviors may be a key point of intervention for promoting adolescent emotion regulation and demoting adolescent substance use.
Ph. D.