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Australia: Marital switches spur child's drug use
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday 04 Apr 2006 Children whose mothers change their marital status frequently are twice as likely to start using cannabis, an Australian researcher has found. The outcome of a 21-year study of more than 3,000 mothers and their children confirmed the association between a lack of parental control and vulnerability to the use of the illicit drug. Dr Reza Hayatbakhsh, a researcher at the University of Queensland's School of Population Health, found children whose mothers married, divorced, became widowed, single or changed to a de facto relationship often turned to cannabis. "The more frequent the change in marital status, the more likely a child will start using cannabis later in life," Dr Hayatbakhsh said. "For children who live in a family with three or more changes in maternal marital status, the risk of the use of illicit drugs by young adulthood is twice as likely and the early onset of such use is three times as likely." Early onset was defined as before the age of 15. Dr Hayatbakhsh put the trend down to a lack of parental supervision and child control which often led to a poor choice of friends and peer groups and then drug use. The problem was often exacerbated by a lower economic status and poverty but the study showed no difference between single motherhood and those in de facto relationships or marriage. "It wasn't in the effect of marital status itself but in the effect of changing marital status," Dr Hayatbakhsh said. Recent Australian studies showed at least one in every three teenagers 14 years or older had used cannabis at least once, compared with other illicit drugs, and cannabis was often the forerunner of other drugs, he said.
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