Familial, Social, and Individual Factors Contributing to Risk for Adolescent Substance Use

Consistent with theory, an examination that reflects family, peer, school, and neighborhood contexts (see Figure 1) will provide a more comprehensive understanding of adolescent substance use as this behavior does not occur in a vacuum. It is also important to consider whether the developmental timing of exposure to parental substance use may influence the chances that the child will develop an SUD. For instance, Biederman and colleagues8 assessed offspring risk of developing an SUD connected with exposure to parental SUD during different developmental stages. Predominantly, boys were at significantly greater risk for developing an SUD when they were exposed to parental SUDs during adolescence than when they were exposed during preschool and latency years. The studies include three prospective cohort studies [24,25,26], one community trial [27], one case-control study [28], and nine cross-sectional studies [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45].

Social Development Model

Risk of substance use as facilitated by involvement with a gang has been shown to decrease in the presence of positive parent-child relationships and authoritative behavioral parenting [64, 65, 67]. The literature often refers to positive familial environment as a protective factor that moderates adolescent substance use via gang involvement [64, 67]. There is some evidence that cultural values of specific ethnic groups can also act as moderating factors or risk factors for adolescent substance use [65, 67]. A legal definition of child neglect includes any situation where a child’s caregiver does not provide adequate living necessities, including protection, clothing, health care, and/or food [31]. For this reason, we consider it useful for future research and interventions to place the focus on family in a multidimensional level.

Parents and Families

This review has addressed some recent knowledge related to the individual, familial, and community risk and preventive factors for adolescent drug use. We suggest that more attention should be given to individual factors since most findings were discussed in relation to such factors. With the increasing trend of drug abuse, it will be critical to focus research specifically on this area. Localized studies, especially those related to demographic factors, may be more effective in generating results that are specific to particular areas and thus may be more useful in generating and assessing local control and prevention efforts. Interventions using different theory-based psychotherapies and a recognition of the unique developmental milestones specific to adolescents are among examples that can be used.

Data availability and materials

Substance abuse and dependence can lead to other forms of mental disorders, including mood, anxiety, and sleep disorders [12]. (4) Future researches are needed, especially focusing on longitudinal monitoring of the effect of long-term exposure to the risk factors mentioned in our and in the previous research. Also, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in this field should be focused on identifying criminal areas in which teen drug abuse young people are more likely to be exposed to violence, poverty, substances, and dissatisfaction with familial relationships to enrich the knowledge of the factors that can affect young people. Finally, it could be useful to stimulate a scientific debate with European and non-European countries to evaluate the topic according to a different cultural point of view and to enrich the discussion about possible interventions.

Substance Abuse and Criminal Conduct

• Mostly, families decide to live in such conditions because they have no choice (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000).
• Given typical patterns of substance use initiation during this developmental period, an emphasis is placed on alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use.
• Increase in either parent to parent conflict, or parent to offspring conflict, has been shown to increase the risk of developing a substance use disorder [9].
• Moreover, participants treated with BSFT have shown a greater improvement in family functioning, also reported for adolescents, than that with TAU.
• Considerable research is available to help answer the question how dual-parent families differ from one another by collapsing such a category into never-divorced/traditional, step-parent/remarried, and foster dual-parent families, yet the same scrutiny has failed to cross over into the single-parent domain.
• Our findings also suggest that the most diffused drug-related crimes in adolescence are economic crimes, weapon carrying, robberies, dealing, and drug possession.

Other studies indicate that selection effects are stronger during adolescence across alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use (Huang et al., 2014; Kiuru, Burk, Laursen, Salmela-Aro, & Nurmi, 2010; McDonough, Jose, & Stuart, 2016). Yet, another study that adopted propensity score analysis to account for a large number of confounding factors demonstrated that these processes were relatively equal in magnitude with respect to adolescent alcohol use (Scalco et al., 2015). The critical age of initiation of drug use begins during the adolescent period, and the maximum usage of drugs occurs among young people aged 18–25 years old [1]. During this period, adolescents have a strong inclination toward experimentation, curiosity, susceptibility to peer pressure, rebellion against authority, and poor self-worth, which makes such individuals vulnerable to drug abuse [2]. During adolescence, the basic development process generally involves changing relations between the individual and the multiple levels of the context within which the young person is accustomed.

Negative health consequences are increasingly being addressed by prevention science, which involves reducing risk and enhancing promotive or protective factors in individuals and the environment surrounding them during their growth and development [4]. Risk factors predict enhanced likelihood of problems, while protective factors mediate or moderate exposure to the risk [5]. Protective factors buffer adolescents from exposure to risks leading to a reduced likelihood of acquiring such problematic behaviours [6]. Additionally, promotive factors play a further role in the decreased likelihood of health problems [7]. Protective factors are distinguished from promotive factors because the later moderates the negative effects of risks for predicting negative outcomes, and therefore only compensates for risk exposure [8]. An understanding of these risk and protective factors is important in the development of effective interventions.

Varying Effects Across Age and Biological Sex

3) Negative-stability and negative-globality domains of optimism were significantly higher among advanced-stage smokers and illicit drug users. Youth opioid use is linked to risky behaviors like not using a condom and that can lead to HIV, STDs, and unintended pregnancy. The bursary does not play any role in the design of the study, or the collection, analysis, interpretation of data, or in drafting the manuscript. It has been postulated that the perception of a child concerning parental behaviour may be more related to the child’s adjustment than is the actual behaviour of his parents.

The Vicious Cycle: Problematic Family Relations, Substance Abuse, and Crime in Adolescence: A Narrative Review

Yet, this effect was only significant for youth carrying a certain genetic variant (i.e., at least one copy of the DRD4 7 repeat allele) in addition to those reporting average and higher levels of maternal involvement (Cleveland et al., 2015). Comorbidity of depression and substance use disorders are common among adolescents, and research has found that these outcomes are linked with each other [77–80]. There is some indication that depressed adolescents may be at higher risk for developing a substance use disorder at an earlier age after the onset of substance use [79]. Furthermore, one study revealed that depressed boys are twelve times as likely to become dependent on alcohol as boys not suffering from depression and that depressed girls are four times as likely to become dependent on alcohol as girls who do not suffer from depression [80].

Familial Influences on Adolescent Substance Use