A new study says that a complicated parenting household has a high chance of leading to a future generation of alcohol abuse within the family.
The study was conducted and published in Molecular Psychiatry, which finds a potentially damaging result for the upbringing of children who live in households where parents have a toxic relationship.
According to Jessica Salvatore, an associate professor and director of the Genes, Environments and Neurodevelopment in Addictions Program at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University, this study falls align with previous research on this particular issue.
“Previous research has shown that genes that predispose people to alcohol use disorder also predispose them to experience more conflict in their close romantic relationships,” says first author Jessica Salvatore. “Based on this, we hypothesized that children who are exposed to divorce or parental relationship discord also inherit a genetic predisposition toward alcohol problems—and that experiencing these family adversities might be one pathway through which genetic risk for alcohol problems is passed from parents to their children.”
Salvatore says that parents with alcohol problems have a higher probability of going through a divorce at some point in their marriage, which unfortunately could play a pivotal role in seeing potential disorder symptoms in their children once they reach adult age.
“What we found is that parents with more alleles for alcohol problems were also more likely to divorce or experience relationship discord, which in turn was associated with greater alcohol use disorder symptoms in their adult children,” Salvatore says.
As parents are aware of, there's nothing more crucial to a kid's development growing up than the environment they are raised in, which is established by the household parents.
Associate professor Jessica Salvatore added the following on the matter of family adversities in this particular issue:
“Genes can shape our environment: Parents’ genes contribute to the types of environment that they create for us. Thus, one of the ways that genetic inheritance works is through our home environment. And these family adversities can turn the dial on our risk of experiencing alcohol use disorder symptoms later on. In other words, it’s not ‘nature’ or ‘nurture,’ but rather nature [genes] contributing to nurture [family experiences].”
