However, mothers’ lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism interacted with the time-varying effect of mother’s alcohol-related symptoms in predicting adolescent’s report of externalizing symptoms (β= −0.13, t=1.98, p=.05). (No interaction was found for the proximal effects of parents’ alcohol-related symptoms and lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism.) Similar to mother-reports, probing of this interaction revealed that the children showed greater externalizing symptoms during those years when their mothers had higher alcohol-related symptoms (i.e., a higher time-varying effect) only if their mothers did not have a lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism (β =0.13, t=2.38, p=.02) rather than if they did (β =0.00, t=−0.05, p=0.96).
