Psychological distress and substance use by adolescent mothers: Associations with parenting attitudes and the quality of mother-child interaction

This study examines associations between psychological distress and alcohol and drug use across the first five years of raising a child and parenting quality at child age si x for 185 adolescent mothers. Overall, alcohol and other drug use in this sample was relatively low, but drug use was associat ed with more mother-reported unrealistic expectations of child behavior and more attributions of child intent to annoy parent by misbehaving. Maternal psychological distress was associated with maternal reports of negative co ntrol (yelling, pushing, spanking, etc.), and alcohol use moderated the ass ociation between psychological distress and negative control. At low levels of alcohol use, more maternal distress was associated with greater negativ e control: at higher levels of alcohol use, maternal distress was not relat ed to negative control, but the absolute level of negative control was simi lar to that reported by more distressed mothers. Neither psychological dist ress nor alcohol and other drug use were related to maternal behavior durin g an interaction task. Overall, much stronger associations with parenting o utcomes were found for an index of maternal vocabulary, compared with mater nal psychological distress or maternal alcohol and other drug use.