developmental considerations into account when designing interventions for adolescents to increase parental knowledge. Although how parents obtain knowledge of their child’s activities, whereabouts, and associations is likely to change as a child ages (i.e., from less monitoring to more communication and adolescent self-disclosure), parental knowledge remains a potent influence on substance use, even as its potency may wane as adolescents age. Findings from previous research had also found that older adolescents who engage in problem behaviors tend to have parents who report less parental knowledge (Laird, Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 2003); however, in this study, we showed that, among African American adolescents, this relationship diminishes naturally from early to middle adolescence, perhaps as part of a normal developmental course. Future research should examine whether this pattern holds for other racial-ethnic groups and whether parental knowledge decreases further during late adolescence. In addition, it remains unclear whether the mechanism by which parental knowledge decreases during adolescence is mostly because youth refrain from telling parents about their problem behaviors or because parents are less likely to solicit information about such behavior.
