The purpose of this study is to further the understanding of how parenting and the relationship between the parent and the youth influence adolescent alcohol use in Mexican American families, with particular attention to acculturation. Results indicated that parental warmth is a strong factor in predicting adolescent alcohol use among Mexican adolescents. The parent-youth relationship played an important role in lowering alcohol use for Mexican American youth. Acculturation has an impact on the level of warmth, control, and the parent-youth relationship for Mexican American families. Findings indicate that there are unique family mechanisms for Mexican American families that should be considered when developing prevention and treatment options. 1. Introduction Latinos constitute the largest and most rapidly growing ethnic group in the US [1]. Currently and over the past twenty years, non-Latino adolescent alcohol use has declined, yet alcohol use among Latino youth has remained high [2]. The Latino population continues to grow and is at a high risk because of the trends in demographics. Mexican Americans constitute 67% of the Latino population, or approximately 28 million individuals [3]. Latino youths have a higher high school dropout rate, a higher proportion of families living in poverty, and the highest fertility rate compared to other minority groups [1]. In addition, there are numerous alcohol-related problems reported by young drinkers, such as interpersonal problems, impaired school and work performance, risky sexual behaviors, and drunk driving [4–6]. For many reasons, such as limited access to the population and an increased diversity of the Latino population, research on Latino adolescent alcohol use is sparse and many studies group all Latino subgroups together, making it difficult to understand differences and similarities between groups [7, 8]. Study findings on a variety of health outcomes, including substance use, have shown differences by Latino subgroup [9, 10]. This study focuses on Mexican American youth because of the lack of specific knowledge on parenting in this subgroup of Latinos. In addition, various studies have shown that Mexican Americans, compared to other Latino subgroups such as Puerto Rican’s, have unique family composition, cultural attitudes, and substance use [11, 12]. It has been demonstrated that family mechanisms, in particular parenting styles, may be of important influence on substance use tendencies among young individuals. Baumrind’s [13] theoretical framework of parenting delineated four dimensions to
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