Although the question of whether distal, proximal, or time-varying effects have a greater impact on child functioning may help us differentiate the relative salience of potential mechanisms of risk, we anticipate that in practice these effects operate collectively and likely in interaction. The presence of time-varying and proximal effects of parents’ alcohol-related symptoms in the presence of such distal effects underscores the multiple ways in which parent alcohol-related symptoms may convey intergenerational transmission of risk for adjustment problems in COAs. Distal factors may remain dominant because they set children on an early risk trajectory but the continuance of that behavior may then function autonomously from the original cause as new causes take over. For example, children may engage in more disinhibited behavior as a result of parent drinking problems, but once they establish a certain level of externalizing symptoms they may gain entry into antisocial peer context (Dishion, Duncan, Eddy, & Fagot, 1994). These peer contexts in turn fuel the maintenance and perhaps escalation of externalizing symptoms. As such, the original externalizing trajectory starts because of parental drinking but then it becomes attached to a broader set of predictors, which may in part include parental drinking, over time.
