Poster #33 - Matched and Mismatched Parental Support for Young Adolescents Experiencing Peer Stress

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Peer relationship stress is one of the critical problems of adolescence. Although parents are important sources of support in dealing with peer stress, their efforts might not be impactful if adolescents are unreceptive to the support parents provide. When parents perceive that adolescents experience peer stress, they might attempt to relieve distress through validation of feelings or encouragement of positive thoughts (i.e., protection) or give behavioral advice about how to address the peer challenge (i.e., guidance). A tenet of the domain-specific theory of socialization (Grusec & Davidov, 2010) is that parenting efforts are more effective when matched with the child’s motivational state, such as protection when adolescents are distressed and guidance when adolescents want or need advice. In contrast, when adolescents are highly distressed about a peer experience, parental guidance may not be received by the adolescents because they have emotional needs, such as being comforted, that render them less receptive. When adolescents want to directly address a peer challenge, parental protection may not be received by adolescents because they need and desire specific advice on how to deal with the challenge. In other words, mismatched support in terms of what adolescents want or need and what parents provide might lead to lower adolescent reception of parental support, whereas matched support might lead to higher adolescent reception.
In the current study, participants included 80 young adolescents (M = 12.36 years, SD = 1.33) and one parent per adolescent. This community-based sample was composed of 55% boys, 55% African Americans, 43% Caucasians, and 2% of other races/ethnicities. Measures of parental support included elements of protection (e.g., responsiveness to adolescent’s feelings) and guidance (e.g., prosocial behavioral advice) during a parent-adolescent discussion about whether and how to approach a lab-based peer-evaluative challenge. We considered adolescent reports of distress during the lab protocol as an indicator of motivation for protection and adolescent reports of wanting to continue the peer-evaluative challenge (rather than give up) as an indicator of motivation for guidance. We measured adolescent reception with an observational code of adolescent attentiveness and responsiveness to the parent during the parent-adolescent discussion.
We tested interactions between measures of parental support and adolescent motivations as related to adolescent reception. Simple slopes analyses showed that adolescents were more receptive to guidance when they were less distressed (Figure 1) and more receptive to protection when they were less inclined to continue a peer challenge (Figure 2). We found no association between guidance and reception when adolescents were more distressed (and potentially desired protection rather than guidance; Figure 1) and no association between protection and reception when adolescents were more inclined to continue a peer challenge (and potentially desired guidance rather than protection; Figure 2). These findings supported our hypothesis that mismatches between parental support and adolescent motivation for support weaken reception. However, the results did not fully support our match hypotheses because matched support (e.g., guidance when adolescents wanted to continue the challenge) did not strengthen reception. We plan to test additional measures of support, motivation, and reception.

Authors

• Zeynep Su Altinoz, Auburn University
  Presenting Author

• Stephen Erath, Auburn University

• Gregory S Pettit, Auburn University