Adolescence is an important period of scaffolding for educational attainment, which is among the strongest predictors of outcomes in multiple domains. Parents who encourage academic success and promote self-regulation may enhance their offspring’s educational attainment. However, parents with externalizing disorders present a complex constellation of risk factors, including low educational attainment and poor parenting, and are more likely to have children with high levels of disinhibition. Previous research has identified low parental education, poor parenting and adolescent impulsivity as threats to educational attainment, but has not examined risk factors for discrepancies in educational attainment among siblings of the same family. Furthermore, studies have not examined the between- and within-family mechanisms that may explain why adolescents with externalizing parents have low educational attainment. The current study addressed these gaps by testing between- and within-family predictors of educational attainment using data from a longitudinal, multigenerational study that oversampled families at risk for alcohol use disorder. The sample consisted of 555 biological siblings within 240 families. We tested whether parental externalizing predicted lower educational attainment through parents’ own lower education, parents’ differential treatment of offspring, and impulsivity. Results suggested that between families, parents with externalizing disorders had lower educational attainment and more impulsive offspring, but did not exhibit increased differential parenting. Within families, siblings with greater impulsivity had lower educational attainment, whereas receiving more preferential maternal treatment than one’s siblings predicted higher educational attainment. Low parental educational attainment mediated the relation between parental externalizing disorders and low offspring educational attainment.

Suicide is a significant public health problem, with incidence rates and lethality continuing to increase yearly. Given the large human and financial cost of suicide worldwide alongside the lack of progress in suicide prediction, more research is needed to inform suicide prevention and intervention efforts. This study approaches suicide from the lens of suicide note-leaving behavior, which can provide important information on predictors of suicide. Specifically, this study adds to the existing literature on note-leaving by examining history of suicidality, mental health problems, and their interaction in predicting suicide note-leaving, in addition to demographic predictors of note-leaving examined in previous research using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS, n = 98,515). We fit a logistic regression model predicting leaving a suicide note or not, the results of which indicated that those with mental health problems or a history of suicidality were more likely to leave a suicide note than those without such histories, and those with both mental health problems and a history of suicidality were most likely to leave a suicide note. These findings reinforce the need to tailor suicide prevention efforts toward identifying and targeting higher risk populations.