For LGBTQ+ teens, what parents think mattered — but only for the use they hadn't planned

Nearly everyone who studies teen substance use asks about peer influence and parental disapproval. Less is known about when those influences actually operate. This study points to an answer: they show up most in the moments a young person hadn't already decided.

Eighty-two lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and pansexual teens aged 15 to 19 who were regularly vaping or smoking answered questions on their phones every morning for a month. Each morning they reported what they'd used the day before and what, if anything, they planned to use that day. Before the month started, we asked how many of their friends used, and how wrong they thought their friends and parents would find it.

Plans mattered enormously. On days a teen woke up intending to use nicotine, cannabis, or alcohol, they were far more likely to do so — nine or ten times the odds, consistently across all three.

But the social influences worked differently depending on whether use was planned.

Teens who believed their parents strongly disapproved of nicotine were much less likely to use it on days they hadn't planned to. Among those who saw their parents as permissive, unplanned nicotine use was near-certain; among those who saw parents as strongly disapproving, it dropped to about one day in five. On planned days, what parents thought made no difference at all.

Friends worked the other way, and specifically LGBTQ+ friends. The more sexual minority friends a teen believed used nicotine, the more likely they were to use on days they hadn't planned to — rising from about 15 percent to about 55 percent as that number went from one friend to nine. Beliefs about heterosexual friends showed no such effect. For alcohol, friends' use predicted planned drinking rather than unplanned.

Two things we expected and didn't find: seeing nicotine posts on social media wasn't related to daily use, and beliefs about what LGBTQ+ friends thought of using weren't either — largely because almost everyone in the sample described their LGBTQ+ friends as approving, leaving too little variation to detect anything.

Why it matters

Unplanned use is where these influences live. That's an argument for interventions that arrive in the moment—refusal skills, correcting inflated estimates of how much friends actually use—rather than only in a weekly session. It's also a reason to involve parents, whose disapproval appears to do real work even with teens who may not be out to them, or who assume it wouldn't matter.

What this doesn't tell us

Eighty-two teens, most of them White and cisgender, all of whom were already using nicotine regularly and had experienced recent anti-LGBTQ+ stress. The findings may not extend to LGBTQ+ young people who use less, or to a more racially diverse group. We measured beliefs about friends and parents once, at the start, so we can't see how they shifted. And this is observational: we can say that teens who perceived stronger parental disapproval used less unplanned nicotine, not that changing a parent's stance would change a teen's behavior.

Mereish EH, Parnes JE, Rentería R, Miranda R Jr. Planned versus unplanned daily substance use among sexual minority youth: the moderating role of social norms. Clinical Psychological Science, 2025.

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