Maternal Religiosity and Adolescent Substance Use: A UK Prospective Cohort Study

Adolescent substance use can have a significant negative impact on life trajectories. Therefore, identifying factors associated with adolescent substance use is important. Previous research has identified parental religiosity as a factor associated with lower adolescent substance use. However, these studies suffered from a number of limitations and are often focussed on US samples, which limit the generalisability of their findings. The present study used a large UK-based longitudinal cohort study (n = 8041) and latent classes of parental religious belief at age 9 to examine the association with offspring adolescent substance use at age 18, while controlling for a range of confounders. We found evidence that suggests, when compared to offspring of agnostic mothers, having a highly religious or atheist mother is associated with lower odds of offspring weekly smoking (OR 0.68 [0.45, 1.02] and OR 0.74 [0.53, 1.04] respectively), and having an atheist mother is associated with greater odds of cannabis (OR 1.32 [1.05, 1.66]) and other drugs use (OR 1.41 [1.02, 1.95]). Our findings suggest that parental beliefs can have an impact on adolescent outcomes, and these associations may be generalisable to non-US contexts.