Indirect Effect of Parent Romantic Behaviors on Adolescent Romantic Competence Through Direct Parenting Practices

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

Despite dating being a normative part of development in adolescents (e.g., Connoly, Nguyen, Pepler, Craig, & Jiang, 2013; Twenge & Park, 2019), little research has assessed the direct and indirect effects parents have on their children’s romantic competencies. Research on parenting and peers suggests that direct management techniques have important implications for the social skills of adolescents (Mounts, 2011), and the goals and beliefs parents have about their adolescent’s social lives is predictive of the direct parenting practices mothers and fathers engage in (Mounts, 2008). This study aims to generalize these findings from peers to romantic partners. First, how are parental guiding, prohibiting, and consulting related to adolescent romantic competencies of love, conflict, and poor problem-solving? Second, is the relationship between parental prohibiting and adolescent romantic competence moderated by adolescent gender? Finally, do parent romantic relationship behaviors have direct or indirect effects on adolescent romantic competencies?

One hundred fifty-four adolescents participated in the study (55.80% girls; Mage = 16.05). All adolescents in the final sample had indicated having some romantic experience and had reported that their parents were in a romantic relationship. Participants completed measures on their perceptions of their parents’ romantic engagement, their own romantic engagement behaviors, and parental management of dating. The Braiker-Kelley Partnership Questionnaire (Braiker & Kelley, 1979) was used to assess adolescent love (alpha = .92) and conflict (alpha = .73), and an adapted version of the measure was used to assess adolescents’ perceptions of parental love (alpha = .93) and conflict (alpha = .79). Two subscales of the Problem-Solving Responses Scale (Exit and Neglect; Rusbolt et al., 1986) were used to assess adolescent poor problem-solving (alpha = .87) and adolescent perceptions of parent poor problem-solving (alpha = .93). An adapted version of the Parent Management of Peers Inventory (Mounts, 2001; 2002) was used to assess parental management of adolescents’ dating: guiding (alpha = .75), prohibiting (alpha = .76), and consulting (alpha = .86).

To address the first research question, variables were analyzed using PROCESS (Hayes, 2018) Model 1. Higher levels of parental consulting were significantly related to higher levels of adolescent love (Beta = 0.19) and general romantic competence (Beta = 0.34). There were no significant direct effects between adolescents’ perceptions of parental romantic behavior and adolescent romantic competence. PROCESS MODEL 4 was used to examine whether the relationship between parents’ romantic behaviors and adolescents’ romantic behaviors were mediated by parental consulting. There was a significant indirect effect of parent love (ab = 0.06, CI[.0002, .14]), conflict (ab = -0.05, CI[-.10, -.01]), poor problem solving (ab = -0.06, CI[-.13, -.01]), and general romantic behaviors (ab = 0.09, CI[.02, .19]) on adolescent love through consulting (see Table 1). There was a significant indirect effect of parent love (ab = 0.04, CI[.003, .07]), conflict (ab = -0.03, CI[-.06, -.004]), poor problem solving (ab = -0.03, CI[-.06, -.001]), and general romantic behaviors (ab = 0.04, CI[.01, .09]) on adolescent general romantic competence through consulting (see Table 1).

Authors

• Lauren E Hauck, Northern Illinois University
  Presenting Author

• Nina S. Mounts, Northern Illinois University
  Non-Presenting Author