The current observation that risk of young adult AUD is uniformly increased regardless of exposure timing contrasts with studies that have identified “sensitive periods” of exposure to other risk factors for later AUD, such as child abuse (19, 21, 22). One possible interpretation of this finding is that risk is independent of the child’s social, cognitive, and brain development at the time of exposure. Another plausible explanation is that a parent’s externalizing behaviors may be consistent throughout their child’s development, even if the behavior does not meet the relatively high clinical thresholds used for these analyses. That is, even parents whose EB only meets our threshold during one of the three time frames are likely to exhibit subthreshold behavior during the other two periods; i.e., the behavioral issues of the parent may not in fact remit entirely. This is consistent with the finding that chronicity increases risk. We are likely underestimating the effect of chronicity of exposure since we are limited to detecting severe manifestations (that is, repeated parental EB registrations across time frames). A third possibility is that the
