We also found that gender differences emerged in the relationship between parental knowledge and adolescent substance use. However, these results were contrary to expectations drawn from the literature in that over the one-year period parental knowledge was related to reductions in substance use among boys rather than girls. Parental knowledge may operate differently among African American girls, or perhaps the marked increase from time 1 to time 3 in girls’ use of marijuana, other drug use, and any drug use relative to boys diminished the influence of parental knowledge. Another factor to account for this unexpected finding is how parental knowledge was assessed in this study. We did not distinguish between parental knowledge obtained through parental monitoring, parental solicitation, or adolescent self-disclosure; some of these may not have been adequately captured in this study but be more common among adolescent girls (Kerr, Stattin, & Burk, 2010).
