Parenting of adolescents: Action or reaction?

In this chapter, the authors take a different approach from those of other researchers in this volume. They start with a robust set of correlational findings that researchers have virtually always attributed to parent effects, and they present empirical evidence that those particular findings might have been child effects. The study tested the possibility that parenting behaviors might be reactions to youths' delinquency, using data from a short-term longitudinal study of 1,283 youths in mid-adolescence. Measures of delinquency, child disclosure, parental solicitation, parental control, parental support, and parents' bad reactions to disclosure were used. While parental monitoring and parental styles literature concluded that parents' direct control of adolescents' activities and associations works protectively to keep youths away from bad friends and out of trouble, the study found that parents' behaviors were reactions to the youth's problem behavior rather than causes of it. Reasons for why these findings contradict so much previous literature are discussed.