Differential Susceptibility to Parenting and Peer Effects on Adolescents’ Psychosocial Adjustment

• In Event: Differential Susceptibility in the Domain of Peers

Abstract

Differential susceptibility theory stipulates that some children are more susceptible than others to both positive and negative environmental exposures and developmental experiences. However, it has remained unclear whether the same individuals are most susceptible to different environmental effects. The paper presented herein seeks to address this issue by focusing on parenting and peer influences on adolescent psychosocial adjustment.
Toward this end, we analyzed data from the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1364, 48.3% female, age range: 10-15 yrs., race/ethnicity: 80.4% white, 12.9% black and 6.7% other). Parenting quality was assessed when children were in 5th and 6th grade, indexed by observed maternal sensitivity, mother-reported closeness and conflict, child-reported maternal warmth and hostility. At the same time, peer influence was measured by three constructs, including major risks by peers, minor risks by peers, and resistance to peer pressure. Psychological adjustment, the outcome of interest, was assessed when adolescents were year 15 by mother-reported peer competence and externalizing problems, adolescent-reported externalizing problems, impulse control, as well as sexual and non-sexual risk-taking.
The average parenting and peer effects were first established, independently, after adjusting for covariates including mother and teacher-reported children’s psychosocial adjustment at 5th grade, as well as family characteristics including children’s race/ethnicity, maternal education, income, father presence, and maternal depression. To answer the primary research question, we applied an influence-statistic method where DFBETAS was innovatively used to measure individual differences in their susceptibility to environmental influences. This statistic quantifies the direction and degree to which each child was affected by parenting and peers, representing each individual’s susceptibility to a particular effect. Correlation analysis of the DFBETAS-indexed susceptibility scores to parenting and to peer effects yielded a significant and positive association (r = 0.40), indicating that children most or least susceptible to the effects of quality of parenting proved to be similarly affected by their peers. Even though, this was not the case for a substantial minority of youth. Indeed, cross-tabulation of terciles of each of the susceptibility scores (representing children with low, moderate, and high susceptibility to each of the effects) revealed that 34% of the total sample proved highly susceptible to one exposure but highly unsusceptible to the other.
The current study extends work on differential susceptibility by looking at multiple sources of environmental influences in a single study. From a basic-science perspective, the findings seem to suggest that it may be problematic to characterize developmental plasticity as a trait-like term. While some children may be similarly susceptible to parenting and peers, as the results revealed, it is also clear that susceptibility to environmental influences may vary depending on the sources of influence. This also provides practical implications for interventions. The fact that at least some children vary dramatically in the effects to which they are most susceptible suggests that targets of effective interventions may vary across children and thus perhaps a more personalized approach is called for (Sayler, Zhang, Steinberg, & Belsky, 2022).

Authors

• Kristina Sayler

• Xiaoya Zhang, University of Florida
  Presenting Author

• Laurence Steinberg, Temple University

• Jay Belsky, University of California, Davis