Parents Use Online Communities to Seek Guidance on Child Substance Use, Parental Use, and Family Substance Use Challenges: A Content Analysis of Reddit Posts.

OBJECTIVES: Parents play a role in shaping their children's beliefs and behaviors around substance use. When faced with unfamiliar or challenging situations, many parents turn to peers for advice. This study characterized the substance use-related advice parents sought from peers in an online parenting forum. METHOD: We conducted a content analysis of substance use-related posts from the r/parenting subreddit. Among the advice-seeking posts included in this study (n=156), thematic coding assessed the presence (yes/no) of seven themes: (1) general communication with children about alcohol and drugs, (2) parental substance use, (3) responding to a child's substance use, (4) permissiveness of a child's substance use under adult supervision, (5) pregnancy or breastfeeding and substance use, (6) nicotine and tobacco use around children, and (7) dealing with an adult family member who is using substances or getting help for substance use problems. Posts could be coded into multiple themes. Two coders independently annotated posts (κ = 0.75). RESULTS: Parents asked about responding to a child's substance use (67/156; 42.9%), parental substance use in parenting contexts (54/156; 34.6%) and navigating other adult family members' substance use (54/156; 34.6%). Parents sought advice about general communication with children about alcohol and drugs (21/156; 13.5%), nicotine and tobacco use around children (19/156; 12.2%), permissiveness of adolescent substance use under adult supervision (18/156; 11.5%), and substance use during pregnancy or breastfeeding (4/156; 2.6%). CONCLUSIONS: Findings may inform the development of targeted resources, guide public health messaging, and support the use of social media data in ongoing research relevant to family development. PUBLIC HEALTH SIGNIFICANCE: This study shows that parents turn to online forums like Reddit for advice related to substance use and their children. Understanding the kinds of questions parents have can help shape educational resources and public health messaging that directly addresses these concerns.