Poster #144 - Incongruency between Parents’ and Adolescents’ reports of Autonomy and Monitoring: Implications for Adolescent Risk Behavior

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Adolescence is associated with significant changes in interpersonal relationships including the parent–adolescent relationship. Two critical parenting behaviors undergoing recalibration are parental monitoring—reflecting knowledge of children’s activities due in part to child disclosure (Stattin & Kerr, 2000)—and autonomy granting—the degree to which parents allow adolescents to make their own decisions. High autonomy (Turner et al., 1993; Dekovic, 1999) and poor parental monitoring (DiClemente et al., 2001) are both related to child maladjustment. Often, adolescents desire more autonomy than parents are willing to grant, leading to a disparity in expectations. Additionally, there is often a disparity between parents’ and adolescents’ reports of parental monitoring, and some work has begun to examine effects of these parent–adolescent incongruencies (Perez et al., 2016; Ksinan & Vazsonyi, 2016). What remains unclear is whether disparities between parent–adolescent reports of autonomy and monitoring relate to maladjustment after controlling for each other and whether the pattern of associations varies between mother–adolescent reports and father–adolescent reports. This study examined if levels of autonomy and monitoring, along with parent–adolescent incongruency in reports of autonomy and monitoring, predict risk behavior. Additionally, we explored whether the aforementioned relations differ for mother–adolescent reports compared to father–adolescent reports.
Data came from the age 15 assessment (n=991) of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Overall, adolescents reported less monitoring and more autonomy compared to mother and fathers, and mothers reported more monitoring and autonomy granting than fathers did. Applying latent congruency techniques, two higher-order latent factors were estimated for autonomy and monitoring, respectively: one for the overall levels of the construct and one for incongruency or difference between reporters (Cheung, 2009). The outcomes included adolescent-reported risk behavior (delinquency, aggression, substance use) and sexual risk-taking (oral sex initiation, number of oral sex partners, penile–vaginal intercourse [PVI] initiation, number of PVI partners) which were also modeled as latent variables.
The mother–adolescent model (Figure 1) had good overall fit, CFI = .94, RMSEA [90% LB, UB] = .02[.02, .02]. Results revealed that less monitoring predicted more frequent engagement in risk behavior, a greater likelihood of sexual initiation, and more sexual partners. Additionally, greater mother–adolescent incongruency in autonomy predicted risk behavior and a greater likelihood of sexual initiation. The father–adolescent model (Figure 2), had good overall fit with similar fit values to the mother–adolescent model, CFI = .94, RMSEA [90% LB, UB] = .02[.02, .02]. Results revealed that lower levels of monitoring predicted more frequent engagement in risk behavior and a greater likelihood of sexual initiation. Moreover, greater father–adolescent incongruency in both monitoring and autonomy predicted more frequent engagement in risk behavior, and a greater incongruency in autonomy predicted a greater likelihood of sexual initiation. Discussion will focus on the implications for adolescent maladjustment of incongruencies in mother– and father–adolescent reports of parenting.

Authors

• Alexander Wasserman, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Wolff, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Crockett, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author