This study represents, to our knowledge, the largest effort to date to understand early childhood predictors of adolescent alcohol use and the pathways through which those associations arise. We use data from the large epidemiological ALSPAC cohort of >12,000 children, containing multiple maternal reports of childhood temperament from 6 months of age to 69 months of age, and self-reports of adolescent alcohol use and problems at age 15.5 years. Several interesting findings emerge. First, temperament characteristics found in very early childhood are significantly associated with alcohol use more than 15 years later, even after controlling for parental alcohol consumption/problems and sociodemographic factors. While a small number of longitudinal studies have examined early childhood factors (e.g., among 5- to 6-year-olds; Kaplow et al., 2002; Masse and Tremblay, 1997), we extend this literature by studying infancy through age 5 and find that temperamental characteristics that can be stably indexed even earlier in life relate to adolescent alcohol problems. Second, the temperament styles associated with subsequent adolescent alcohol-related outcomes are very different and largely uncorrelated. Children who are rated as consistently sociable through
