Family Instability and Young Adolescent Maladjustment: The Mediating Effects of Parenting Quality and Adolescent Appraisals of Family Security

Examined relations among family instability and adolescent's psychological functioning using family models of children's emotional security in a sample of 220 young adolescents and their primary caregivers. Primary caregiver reports of family instability were associated with multiple informant measures of adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Findings from structural equation models supported the hypothesis that family instability increases adolescent risk for psychological problems by directly undermining their insecure appraisals of the family. Results also supported a pathway whereby family instability predicted parenting difficulties and parenting difficulties, in turn, indirectly predicted adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms through its association with lower levels of perceived insecurity in the family. Results are discussed in relation to how they advance process-oriented conceptualizations of family instability.