Does your mother know? : parent-child communication about adolescent daily activities

Abstract

Juvenile offending is a wide-spread problem in Western societies: More than half of the adolescents engage in minor forms of delinquency, and this causes high material and immaterial costs. One of the strongest predictors of such types of delinquency is whether or not parents are aware of their adolescents’ leisure time activities, their friendships, and whereabouts. The current dissertation examined potential sources of parental knowledge: teens’ management of information from their parents, that is, adolescents’ decisions to disclose or to keep information secret from their parents and parents’ active monitoring efforts to keep track of their children daily activities, such as asking questions or controlling access to information. I thereby examined bidirectional and developmental linkages of adolescent information management and parental monitoring with adolescent delinquency, and I examined the broader parent-child relationship context in which such communication takes place. This dissertation revealed that parental knowledge mainly results from voluntary adolescent disclosure and not from parental monitoring efforts. Findings suggest, moreover, that low levels of parental control may not be a risk-factor for, but in stead result from adolescent engagement in delinquency. However, adolescent information management and delinquency were bidirectionally and developmentally linked. Particularly adolescent secrecy from parents was found to predict future involvement in delinquency and a too strong decrease in adolescent disclosure related to a stronger increase in delinquency. The parent-adolescent relational context was found to moderate the effects of parental control on delinquency. Retaining higher levels of parental control may only be effective in reducing delinquency when parent-child relationships are of lower quality. Retaining higher levels of control in highly supportive relationships, may even predict higher levels of delinquency. Finally, findings suggest that adolescents will keep less secrets and disclose more when parents ask non-intrusive questions and give high levels of supportive. Also, shared leisure time activities may relate to higher levels of adolescent voluntary disclosure. As such, this dissertation extended a previous reinterpretation of monitoring by showing that adolescent information management, and secrecy in particular, is a longitudinal predictor of adolescent offending. Longitudinal effects of parental monitoring on delinquency may be negative or positive depending on the relationship context. Furthermore, a high quality relationship context, in which parents and teens share time with each other, which is characterized by high levels of parental support, and in which parents manage to ask non-intrusive questions may increase teens’ willingness to voluntary disclose to their parents, and decrease their levels of secrecy, regarding their daily activities