Development and Transformation: Parenting, Parent-Adolescent Relationships, and Family Dynamics Across Adolescence

Abstract

Background: Parenting is a broad construct that entails anything that parents do, think about, and feel regarding raising their children. Despite the breadth of the parenting construct, parenting has been commonly conceptualized as reflecting two behavioral dimensions: parental warmth or support, and parental behavioral control. Parenting an adolescent maybe especially challenging for parents. Because adolescence brings with it many changes, including cognitive, hormonal, and changes in the adolescents’ social contexts, parents may have to adjust the ways they interact with their adolescent child. Parents need to allow for more autonomy. But at the same time, adolescents must accept that they still need parental guidance. Therefore, the development of parenting during adolescence is a dyadic process. In this dyadic process, the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship is also of paramount importance. Parent-adolescent relationship quality is often conceptualized as ridden by parent-adolescent conflict, yet conflict can adaptively transform this relationship. Furthermore, because of the many changes brought by adolescence, parents and adolescents often hold diverging views of their relationships. This divergence is important to further examine and understand, because the highest the divergence, the greater the difficulties for both adolescents, and parents. The marital relationship also faces challenges during adolescence. Marital conflict is particularly important to study further, because of its resounding effects on parent-adolescent relationships, and on adolescent adaptation. Despite the relative wealth of related empirical research, many aspects of extant empirical research preclude clear conclusions on whether and how marital conflict might affect parenting and the parent-adolescent relationship. Aims: This dissertation aimed to investigate: 1) the development of parenting and the transformation of parent-adolescent relationships during adolescence, as well as 2) how conflict might run in family subsystems. Conclusions: A first take-home message is that different aspects of parenting and parent-adolescent relationships follow different developmental trajectories, and that parents and adolescents often hold diverging perceptions thereof. Specifically, we found that when it comes to the rather behavioral aspects of parenting (parental support and parental behavioral control), both parents and adolescents seem to perceive transformations in a similar way, even though they start at different points during early adolescence. However, when it comes to the rather emotional aspects of the parent-adolescent relationship (conflict intensity), parents and adolescents perceive development in markedly different ways. This motif indicates that future studies of development during adolescence will benefit by employing multiple informants, and by studying multiple aspects of the parent-adolescent relationship. A second take-home message is that for most families marital conflict does not affect parenting or parent-adolescent conflict, at least not in the way we currently theorize it does. The results of three studies in this dissertation showed that the strong and negative associations between marital conflict and parenting or parent-adolescent relationship quality are mainly located at the between-family level, indicating that marital conflict is most probably not causally linked to parenting and parent-adolescent relationship. Other factors, possibly indicators of individual differences (e.g., social skills, personality, genetic makeup, or a combination thereof), might be responsible for the strong between-family correlations.