Study: Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol, Behavior Problems in Children Linked

A study from Indiana University focuses on the effect that the use of alcohol by parents had on problems with conduct in children.

The results are from a national study with 4,912 mothers and 8,621 children that looks that the connection between mothers who drank at even a moderate level during pregnancy and the conduct problems that their children developed. Some of the problems were breaking things on purpose, bullying, cheating and lying.

The results showed that the conduct problems increased in relation to each additional day of the week that the mother drank, on an average.

They were able to eliminate many other possible expatiations for the conduct problems mainly because the study included more than one child from the same mother, which gave them the opportunity to look at brothers and sisters who had a different level of exposure to alcohol because the mothers did not drink at the same rate in every pregnancy. They found that the children who were more exposed to greater levels of alcohol had more conduct problems than their brothers and sisters who were exposed to less.

One of the problems that has them most concerned is the fact that many women are drinking before they know they are expecting.

The data was gathered from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The mothers chosen were enrolled in the survey form 1979 to 1994 and then every other year until 2004. The mothers were given questions about their substance use. They also looked at the figures regarding the children, aged 4-11 all of whom were in the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth since 1986.

They look at other factors besides the behavior problems, namely the connection between being exposed to alcohol and the development of attention problems and being impulsive.

They found that the children of mothers who did drink alcohol during pregnancy did have more attention and impulsive problems. In this instance, they did not find any differences in the siblings' behavior if the mother drank more during one pregnancy than the other.