Several studies have examined the influence of parental divorce on drinking initiation, largely using retrospective reports from adult samples. Rothman et al. (2008) showed that current/former adult drinkers (mean age 30) who reported adverse childhood experiences, with the most commonly reported event being parental separation/divorce, were more likely to retrospectively report initiation by age 14. Dube et al. (2006) likewise found increased odds of initiating alcohol use by age 14 among adults (mean age 56) who reported parental divorce by age 18 and Sartor et al. (2007) found in an offspring-of-twin sample of young adults (mean age 20) that parental divorce predicted a younger age of first drink. Using both a young adult and an adolescent offspring-of-twins sample, Waldron and colleagues replicated this finding using a time-varying covariate to represent parental separation, thus eliminating the potential misattribution of risk to parental separation in cases where it followed the onset of the substance use outcome. Findings indicated that parental separation prior to age 18 was associated with earlier onset of drinking and alcohol intoxication (Waldron et al., 2014a; 2014b), even controlling
