One explanation of this relationship could be because youth with behavioral problems are less likely to disclose details of their lives to parents. Additionally, parents may feel that they are unable to manage their high externalizing child and start to give up and withdraw, resulting in less parental knowledge (Kerr et al. 2008; Racz and McMahon 2011). In addition, T1 externalizing behavior also predicted subsequent levels of parental knowledge at T2. This suggests the bidirectional associations between adolescent externalizing behavior and parenting (Pardini 2008), highlighting the effects of the child on parents as well. Collectively, our findings suggest potential ethnic/racial differences in vulnerability such that European American youth may be more susceptible to peer influences (e.g., peer substance use), whereby parents continue to exert a more important role in youth outcomes further into adolescence in African American youth (Wallace and Muroff 2002). Future research is needed to take a cultural genomics approach by examining the interplay between genes and environments across and within different cultural groups (Causadias and Korous 2018), as the salience of different pathways/mechanisms of genetic risk may vary across different racial/ethnic background.
