Parent-Child Alienation and Adolescent Discrimination Moderate the Time-Varying Monitoring-Delinquency Link across Adolescence

• In Event: 3-181 - Exploring Moderating and Mediating Processes in the Links between Parenting and Ethnic Minority Youth’s Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Parental monitoring is proposed to be a key protective factor of adolescent delinquency; however, empirical findings are inconsistent, suggesting the need to identify moderators of the monitoring-delinquency link (Racz & McMahon, 2011). The relation between monitoring and delinquency may vary across different periods of adolescence, given rife psychosocial and behavioral changes during adolescence (Collins & Laursen, 2004). Moreover, the negative monitoring-delinquency link may be stronger in the context of higher parent-child relationship quality because parenting practices are more effective in such context, based on the integrative model of parenting (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). Furthermore, discrimination is an important context to consider for minority children’s development, according to the integrative model for minority children (Garcia Coll et al., 1996), and has been associated with more adolescent delinquent behaviors (Benner et al., 2018). In more discriminatory environments, parental monitoring may be even more important to reduce adolescent delinquency. Thus, the current study examines: (a) whether the relation between maternal monitoring and adolescent delinquency changes across early, middle, and late adolescence, and (b) if parent-child relationship quality (i.e., alienation) and discrimination moderate the time-varying monitoring-delinquency link.

The current study used combined data from two two-wave longitudinal datasets of 444 Chinese American families (adolescent Mage.wave1 = 13.03, SD = 0.73), and 604 Mexican American families (adolescent Mage.wave1 = 12.96, SD = .94). The combined data were structured length-wise based on participants’ age at each wave with a total age span of 11 to 18 (54% female). All variables used in the current study were assessed with the same measures across datasets and were reported by adolescents at each wave. We analyzed time-varying effect models (TVEM; Tan, Shiyko, Li, Li, & Dierker, 2012), in which the relations between predictors (i.e., monitoring, parent-child alienation, discrimination, and interaction terms between them) and adolescent delinquent behaviors were described across continuous age.

On average, maternal monitoring was negatively related to adolescent delinquent behaviors across adolescence and the negative link became stronger from early to middle adolescence (Figure 1). The time-varying monitoring-delinquency link was moderated by parent-child alienation and adolescent discrimination. For the high alienation group, the negative monitoring-delinquency link was significant only during early to middle adolescence, with a stronger link in middle adolescence; in contrast, for the low alienation group, there was a significant negative monitoring-delinquency link across adolescence and the strength of the link remained stable (Figure 2a). For the high discrimination group, the negative monitoring-delinquency link was significant across adolescence, and the link became stronger from early to middle adolescence; whereas for the low discrimination group, the negative monitoring-delinquency link was significant during early to middle adolescence and the strength of the link remained stable (Figure 2b).

These results indicate that, overall, monitoring may be more beneficial during middle adolescence, in the context of low parent-child alienation and high levels of adolescent discrimination experiences. The findings suggest that promoting parental monitoring may be particularly important during middle adolescence and in discriminatory environments. Improving the parent-child relationship quality may strengthen the effectiveness of monitoring in reducing delinquency.

Authors

• Yang Hou, University of Texas in Austin
  Presenting Author

• Su Yeong Kim, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author