Our findings also showed that parental monitoring partially accounted for the relationship between paternal problematic substance use and adolescent alcohol, cigarette, marijuana, prescription drug, and inhalant use. These findings stand in contrast to that of mothers, which showed that maternal closeness, not monitoring, played an important role in adolescent substance use. Most previous studies have failed to disentangle the effects of parental monitoring from both parents (e.g., Cleveland, Feinberg, & Greenberg, 2010), and these findings indicate that the ability of parents to effectively monitor their children's behavior may reduce the chances that paternal problematic substance use will impact adolescents’ use of substances. It is possible that paternal problematic substance use leads to more adverse personal and family consequences that hinder the ability of fathers, and the family unit as a whole, to effectively monitor their adolescents’ behavior. Again, we did not find any gender, racial/ethnic or living arrangement differences in the relation between monitoring and adolescent substance use. However, it is possible that the lack of significant differences may have been due to insufficient power in some of the subgroup analyses.
