Parenting practices moderated the relation between family density of alcohol problems and child behavior, such that density effects on BD and CP were reduced to non-significance when at least two of the three parenting dimensions (parental warmth, discipline consistency, and parental monitoring) were above median levels. In contrast to prior studies finding lesser quality parenting in the presence of parental alcoholism (Chassin et al., 1996) or elevated parental alcohol use (Latendresse et al., 2008), we did not find an association between density of alcoholism and parenting practices. The unique construction of our parenting variable, created to reflect the composite of parenting behaviors known to be important for child adjustment, may partly explain the different finding. We view this measurement strategy as a strength of the study that indicates the importance of multiple parenting behaviors collectively. The analytic strategy may also have decreased the possibility of measuring reactive punishment tendencies (i.e., harsh discipline in response to child misbehavior) because children had to rate their parents above median on at least two parenting practices to be included in the more effective parenting
