Every parent has moments when a small transgression seems forgivable. But what happens when that habit of excusing wrongdoing becomes part of the moral fabric of a household? A new three-year longitudinal study from Spain suggests that when parents justify immoral behavior, their children may internalize that same moral flexibility and, in turn, become more likely to use legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco.
The research, conducted by Joaquín Rodríguez-Ruiz of the University of Huelva along with Raquel Espejo-Siles and Izabela Zych of the University of Córdoba, appears in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. It draws on the psychological concept of moral disengagement, first described by Albert Bandura and colleagues in the 1990s. Moral disengagement is the process by which people switch off their internal moral sanctions, allowing themselves to commit acts that violate their own ethical standards without feeling remorse. Mechanisms include moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, and diffusion of responsibility.
Decades of research have linked moral disengagement to aggression, bullying, cyberbullying, and violence in adolescents. Evidence connecting it to substance use has been sparser. Cross-sectional studies in Australia found that moral disengagement was associated with underage drinking, heavy episodic drinking, and cannabis use among secondary school students. Research with British college athletes linked the construct to doping attitudes, and an online survey of British adults found that high moral disengagement predicted cocaine use. But cross-sectional designs cannot establish which comes first, leaving a crucial gap in understanding.
To address this, the Spanish team followed 533 adolescents, 48.1 percent female and 51.9 percent male, across three consecutive school years starting in fall 2020. Participants were on average 12.46 years old at the first assessment. The researchers measured perceived parental moral disengagement using a questionnaire asking adolescents how often their parents justified immoral behavior, with items such as my parents think it is fine to treat certain people badly. They also administered a short version of Bandura’s Moral Disengagement Scale and a substance use subscale covering legal substances like beer, wine, spirits, and tobacco, as well as illegal ones including cannabis, cocaine, and amphetamines.
The statistical strategy was rigorous. Because the data were non-normal, the team used bootstrapping with 1,000 resamples to estimate robust standard errors and compute bias-corrected 95 percent confidence intervals for indirect effects. If the confidence interval for an indirect effect excludes zero, that effect is considered statistically significant. This approach allows researchers to formally test mediation, meaning whether a third variable explains the pathway between a cause and an outcome.
The results were strikingly specific. Parental moral disengagement at the first wave showed no significant direct effect on licit substance use at the third wave. But the indirect pathway was significant. Parents who morally disengaged had adolescents who themselves scored higher on moral disengagement a year later, and those adolescents went on to report more alcohol and tobacco use the following year. The indirect effect was statistically significant with a 95 percent confidence interval that did not include zero.
Why the asymmetry between legal and illegal substances? The authors point to accessibility and perceived risk. Alcohol and tobacco are easy to obtain, widely consumed, and sometimes even reported in childhood, so parental justification may readily extend to them. Illegal drugs, by contrast, are more harmful, harder to access, and often tied to criminal settings. That severity may keep both parents and adolescents from morally excusing their use, explaining why parental moral disengagement at baseline did not predict later illicit substance use.
The theoretical framework combines Bandura’s Social Learning Theory with Robert Putnam’s Social Capital Theory. Social learning holds that children acquire attitudes and behavioral scripts from their social environment, most powerfully from parents. When a parent routinely justifies harmful behavior, the child learns a cognitive style, not just a specific attitude. Social Capital Theory adds that healthy social relationships protect against problem behavior, so a family environment saturated with moral excuses erodes one of the strongest protective resources an adolescent has.
The study has limitations worth noting. Data came from self-reports, which can be shaped by social desirability, although self-reports remain the standard tool for measuring problem behavior in adolescents. The sample was selected by convenience from 16 schools in the province of Córdoba rather than being nationally representative, and attrition from the first to third wave was 38.28 percent, mostly due to absences, school changes, and unusable codes. The authors also call for future models that account for confounders such as availability, peer pressure, and comorbid psychiatric conditions.
The practical implications are nonetheless compelling. Because the pathway from parents to substance use runs through the adolescents’ own moral disengagement, programs that strengthen adolescents’ moral competencies could interrupt the chain even when parents continue to model moral shortcuts. Schools, the authors argue, could play a central role in such efforts. And since parental involvement boosts the effectiveness of adolescent psychosocial interventions, prevention programs may need to target parents’ moral reasoning as well. This research, the first to link parental moral disengagement prospectively to substance use, suggests that the fight against adolescent drinking and smoking may begin not with the substances themselves, but with the everyday excuses families make.
Subject of Research: Intergenerational transmission of moral disengagement and its longitudinal mediation of adolescent licit substance use
Article Title: Parental Moral Disengagement and Adolescent Substance Use: The Mediating Role of Adolescents’ Moral Disengagement in a Three-Wave Longitudinal Study
Article References: Rodríguez-Ruiz, J., Espejo-Siles, R., & Zych, I. (2026). Parental Moral Disengagement and Adolescent Substance Use: The Mediating Role of Adolescents’ Moral Disengagement in a Three-Wave Longitudinal Study. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01730-3
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01730-3
Keywords: moral disengagement, parenting, adolescence, substance use, alcohol, tobacco, Social Learning Theory, longitudinal study, mediation analysis, prevention, moral development, addiction
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