Given evidence for early behavior problems to presage the emergence of later substance use and abuse in adolescence, developmental models of this progression represent an advance for understanding the early roots of substance abuse risk and their unfolding over ontogenesis. Recent work has begun to model these processes within a developmental cascades framework. Rather than relying on an ascertainment of the extent to which multiple risk factors aggregate to probabilistically predict substance use problems, these models strive to demonstrate a developmental sequence of risk processes, whereby early risk factors generate subsequent vulnerabilities in development, which in turn transact to produce further risk for competent adaptation. Such cascade models are consistent with the transactional–ecological formulation of the sequelae of maltreatment (Cicchetti & Lynch, 1993; Cicchetti & Valentino, 2006).
