Different effects of maternal and paternal alcoholism are understudied [12], although some studies suggest that maternal drinking has a greater impact than paternal drinking [8,37], or that maternal alcohol use is more predictive of internalizing problems, and paternal alcohol use of externalizing problems [25,38]. If maladjustment is transmitted by social strains, one should expect variables expressing stress to mediate the associations between parental drinking and child maladjustment. Therefore, if these children exhibit poor school adjustment, it is important to know whether this is caused by other problems they have previously been found to have, like mental distress [12,39] and poor social network [40,41], or whether it appears independent of those factors. A part of the causal chain may be exposure to parental drinking. One should expect that being directly exposed to parental drinking is more harmful than having parents who conceal their drinking. Moreover, as contextual factors may influence child adjustment, it is important to control for potential confounders, such as divorce, and other demographic variables.
