Of all the drugs used by adolescents, marijuana is considered to be the most widely used. It found that 42% of high school seniors admitted to experimenting with the drug. Continued use of this drug has been shown to produce a number of consequences that are quite serious, including depression, cardiovascular disease, and impaired cognitive activities along with some types of cancer. Thus, it is important that adolescents do not use marijuana and therefore; several medical and behavioral scientists have been working.

Parents are considered to be the best way to prevent marijuana use and there have been several studies that have focused on this factor. Parental control, particularly when parents know very well where their child is going, who they are with and what they are doing, is vitally important and has been found to attenuate a range of negative behaviors such as gambling, use of drugs and sexual activity. While parental supervision has been effective in such cases, its link to marijuana remains unclear. If a teen uses this drug, he is more likely to do so without telling her parents compared to other behaviors he may be open about. Although there is uncertainty about whether or not parental controls are effective in preventing teen drug and marijuana use, vast amounts of money are being spent on programs and media campaigns to help teens. parents prevent this particular behavior from their children. .

Claremont Graduate University psychologists by the name of Andrew Lac and William Crano were involved in reviewing a series of studies to examine whether or not there is a connection between teen marijuana use and parental control. These psychologists selected 17 studies from the existing literature and these contained around 35,000 participants. The criteria on which these studies were selected include adolescent participation, drug use being given a primary focus, and parental follow-up being something that the adolescent himself or herself assessed through appropriate measures. self-report and not parents. himself reporting her own behavior.

The results of their study are reported in this issue of Perspectives on Psychological Sciences, which is published by the Association for Psychological Science, and they revealed that there was a strong and highly reliable link between parental control and decreased use of of marijuana among adolescents. Strong effects were also found mainly in studies that were only of women.

The authors stated that their review suggests that parents are by no means irrelevant, even when it comes to such secretive and illegal behavior by children. According to them, the results of their review could help in programs aimed at preventing the use of marijuana and can target parents and offer information on how to eliminate this risky behavior from children.