Our mediation model findings indicate the potentially important role of mother’s current mental health for the behavioral adjustment of the children in alcohol-dense families. Poorer maternal mental health (e.g., more symptoms of depression, anxiety, etc.), above and beyond other parental characteristics including marital status and education, significantly mediated the association of family density with both BD and with CP. As might be expected due to socialization influences occurring within families, greater maternal deviance (e.g., theft, writing bad checks) also partially explained the association between family density and child CP. Such co-occurring social disadvantage, distress, or psychopathology among parents is known to be prevalent in families with a heavy-drinking parent (but has not been documented per se among high-density families). Assortative mating may partly explain these findings (Merikangas and Brunetto, 1996). It is also possible that common genetic influences may be operating. Maternal distress and decreased “social capital” (Elgar et al., 2004) may be associated with child behavior for reasons that are environmental as well as genetic, and unidirectional or bidirectional (Rutter, 1990). For example, there is a well-established association between
