Our findings have several implications. First, our results underscore both parental divorce and parental discord as stressful family events that are linked to a child’s future alcohol outcomes, including earlier alcohol initiation and risk for experiencing clinically significant alcohol problems. Second, in European ancestry families, our results show that family adverse events and children’s genetic risk for alcohol problems interact on an additive, but not multiplicative, scale to influence children’s key drinking milestones. This demonstrates that the effect of family adverse events and effect of children’s genetic predisposition operate jointly in influencing their alcohol outcomes. The combined effect of family adverse events and children’s genetic risk is greater than the sum of the individual effects of family adverse events and children’s genetic risk. Individuals who are genetically predisposed to alcohol problems and exposed to parental divorce and discord may be an especially important group to target to reduce risk of developing alcohol problems. This highlights the importance of intervention efforts aimed toward reducing family relationship distress as well as strategies for helping families and children effectively cope with divorce and
