The present results provide several suggestions for prevention and treatment of substance use disorders and offer new questions for future research. First, it appears that offspring of alcoholic parents are more vulnerable to developing a psychiatric disorder during adolescence than in childhood. Multiple assessments of high and low-risk children and adolescents has revealed that children who are free of illness in childhood are relatively more likely to be free of psychiatric illness in adolescence though a significantly greater number of high-risk children without a disorder in childhood developed a new diagnosis during adolescence than did controls. It also appears that absence of a childhood diagnosis predicts an absence of a diagnosis in adolescence for control children much better than it does for high risk offspring. Adolescence appears to be an especially vulnerable period for youngsters with familial/genetic background suggestive of greater alcohol use disorder susceptibility. Nevertheless, 22% of high-risk children were free of illness during adolescence. These offspring are especially interesting because of their resiliency. We have previously noted that offspring of alcohol dependent mothers are more likely to escape
