The ECOT model continues to be a powerful tool for probing the mechanisms underlying associations between parenting and adolescent behavior. Here, we conducted a very rigorous test of the mechanisms of the association between parental knowledge and adolescent externalizing, accounting for genetic influences of parents and adolescents using the ECOT model. Our findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that parents’ knowledge about their adolescents’ activities and whereabouts exerts an environmental influence serving to reduce adolescent externalizing. This finding is particularly important for prevention, because it suggests that increasing parental knowledge is a viable target for interventions aiming to reduce or prevent adolescent externalizing in normative samples, before severely elevated levels of problems emerge.
