The current findings indicate that parents’ lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism has a large and consistent effect on identifying which children show increased externalizing symptoms that is unique from the average, proximal effects of parents’ alcohol-related symptoms. In addition, parents’ alcohol-related symptoms increase risk for children’s externalizing symptoms during those periods when their parents’ are actively experiencing alcohol-related symptoms. The size of this effect was small, though perhaps not surprisingly so given that the analysis was conservative in testing these three unique effects of parent alcoholism jointly. However, these effects appear largely limited to externalizing, as opposed to internalizing, symptoms and were not as consistent as the distal effects of parents’ alcoholism on children’s symptomatology. One reason why distal effects may have been more consistent in this study was the greater measurement precision for the lifetime diagnosis assessment than for the proximal and time-varying effects of symptomatology. Future studies that address this problem of measurement equivalence would be informative. Moreover, studies that further consider the time-scale on which parent alcoholism impacts children’s functioning are important in that they inform the search
