Poster #97 - Maternal Friendship Management: How Mothers Shape and Respond to Child and Friend Adjustment ProblemsMaternal Friendship Management: How Mothers Shape and Respond to Child and Friend Adjustment Problems

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Parents worry about peer influence. And for good reason: During the pre- and early adolescent years, friends come to rival and even surpass parents in companionship, closeness, and importance. Friend influence over problem behavior also grows during this period. Meta-analytic results revealed small but consistent influence effects indicating that friends become more similar on a host of conduct and emotional problems. Not surprisingly, many parents respond to these developments by attempting to direct or manage the peer relationships of their children. In one survey, almost 2/3 of parents reported that they were actively involved in attempts to manage these relationships. Although parental monitoring appears to have a salutatory effect, active involvement, such as attempting to manage peer relations, can backfire, with undesirable consequences. The present study seeks to replicate and extend previous work on the topic, to explore the antecedents and consequences of maternal friendship management. Specifically, we examined whether child reports of maternal friendship management anticipate changes in their own behavior problems and in those of their best friend. We also examined whether mothers increased friendship management efforts in response to their own child’s behavior problems and to those of their child’s best friend. We focus on the late primary and early middle school years, when children spend increasing amounts of time with friends, outside of direct parent supervision. The participants (ages 10 to 14) were 284 Lithuanian public-school students (148 boys, 136 girls) who were involved in 142 stable friendships. Each friend described their own conduct problems, emotional problems, and perceptions of maternal friendship management twice during the same academic year (M=14.4 weeks apart). Dyadic analyses replicated previous findings in that one friend’s conduct and emotional problems forecast changes in the same problems in the other friend. Greater initial problems also anticipated increases in children’s’ perceptions of friendship management by their own--but not their friend’s—mother, highlighting maternal efforts to intervene in the relations of troubled children. These interventions met with mix success. On the one hand, maternal friendship management result in subsequent declines in adjustment problems among their own children; to the contrary, the conduct problems of boys increased with greater maternal involvement. On the other hand, adjustment problems declined among children whose friends reported higher levels of maternal involvement, suggesting that maternal friendship management may interfere with the spread of problem behaviors between children.

Authors

• Goda Kaniušonytė, Mykolo Romerio universitetas
  Presenting Author

• Rita Zukauskiene

• Aistė Bakaitytė

• Brett Laursen, Florida Atlantic University