We found stronger effects of family density of alcohol problems for boys than for girls, which is consistent with reports of a possible pathway into early drinking that is more common among males and that includes “disinhibitory psychopathology” (McGue et al., 2001) and “Type II or Type B alcoholism” (Babor et al., 1992; Zucker et al., 1995). Our findings, however, do not preclude the possibility that later-developing behavior problems in girls will contribute to alcoholism risk. For example, Heath and colleagues (Heath et al., 1997) found that childhood CD was a potentially important mediator of genetic risk for alcoholism among adult female twins. Moreover, our finding of gender-specificity in this model may have been affected by our inclusion of attention regulation and outward behavioral regulation (e.g., impulse control, activity level) in the same latent construct. These variables are less linked among females. Girls are more likely to have attention regulation difficulties in the absence of other behavior problems (Milich et al., 2001). Other mediators not examined here, such as negative affect regulation, may be more relevant for girls.
