Poster #153 - Trajectories of psychological control throughout adolescence and young adulthood

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parental psychological control involves the manipulation of a child’s thoughts, feelings, and attachment to the parent to elicit compliance, and has been linked with a number of poor psychosocial outcomes (Aquilino, 2006; Barber & Harmon, 2002). Because psychological control is believed to undermine the child’s autonomy by promoting continued dependence on the parent, it may be especially detrimental during adolescence, a critical period for the development of autonomy (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010). Surprisingly, few studies have examined longitudinal change in parents’ psychological control across adolescence, or the variability that might exist in these trajectories. Therefore, using a person-centered approach to assess underlying heterogeneity, we examined developmental trajectories of mothers’ and fathers’ psychological control from ages 12 to 19, as well as predictors and outcomes of these trajectories.
Participants for this study were 500 adolescents and parents from the northwestern United States who participated in a 10 year longitudinal study (Mage = 11.21, SD = .96; 337 two-parent families, 163 single-parent families; 65.4% European American, 12.2% African American, 18.2% multi-ethnic). Participants responded to questionnaires providing information on parents’ education, adolescents’ perceptions of parental psychological control, adolescent’s externalizing problems, and parents’ and adolescents’ symptoms of anxiety and depression. Growth mixture models were estimated separately for mothers and fathers in Mplus version 8.0. Once the best-fitting solutions were identified using fit statistics, we examined predictors and outcomes of psychological control trajectories.
Results showed that a 2-class solution was favored for mothers (see Figure 1). Class 1 (91%) had a low intercept for psychological control but increased gradually across adolescence before tapering at age 17 (“gradual increasers”). Class 2 (9%) had a higher, more moderate intercept that remained stable across time (“moderate stable”). The “moderate stable” mothers reported higher depressive symptoms compared to the “gradual increasers” (OR = 1.39, p = .03), and their adolescents had higher levels of depression (MC2 = 2.17, SD = .39; MC1 = 1.74, SD = .18), anxiety (MC2 = 1.57, SD = .43; MC1 = 1.15, SD = .19) and externalizing problems (MC2 = 0.69, SD = .94; MC1 = 0.15, SD = .12) by young adulthood.
For fathers, a 2-class solution was favored (see Figure 2). Class 1 (85%) showed a low intercept that remained stable across adolescence (“low stable”). Class 2 (15%) showed a slightly higher intercept that increased substantially over time, until it eventually decreased later in adolescence (“increasing decreasing”). Fathers in the “increasing decreasing” group had less formal education than fathers in the “low stable” group (OR = -0.31, p = .04), and their adolescent children reported more depressive symptoms (MC2 = 2.36, SD = .35; MC1 = 1.66, SD = .20) and externalizing problems (MC2 = 0.61, SD = .36; MC1 = 0.13, SD = .12) by young adulthood. The discussion will focus on the value of exploring heterogeneity in longitudinal trajectories of psychological control and the potential added risk for those adolescents whose parents are outside the somewhat normative low levels of psychological control

Authors

• Adam A. Rogers, Brigham Young University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ryan McLean, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• Laura M Padilla-Walker, Brigham Young University
  Non-Presenting Author