Parenting and Adolescent Problem Behavior

An Integrated Model With Adolescent Self-Disclosure and Perceived Parental Knowledge as Intervening Variables

Soenens, Bart
Vansteenkiste, Maarten
Luyckx, Koen
Goossens, Luc

¹Department of Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

²Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bart Soenens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected].

Bart Soenens and Maarten Vansteenkiste are research assistants at the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders. We are greatly indebted to Koen Lowet and Ilse Smits for their assistance in data collection.

Received Date: January 25, 2005; Revised Date: September 25, 2005; Accepted Date: September 26, 2005

Developmental Psychology 42(2):p 305-318, March 2006.

Parental monitoring, assessed as (perceived) parental knowledge of the child's behavior, has been established as a consistent predictor of problem behavior. However, recent research indicates that parental knowledge has more to do with adolescents' self-disclosure than with parents' active monitoring. Although these findings may suggest that parents exert little influence on adolescents' problem behavior, the authors argue that this conclusion is premature, because self-disclosure may in itself be influenced by parents' rearing style. This study (a) examined relations between parenting dimensions and self-disclosure and (b) compared 3 models describing the relations among parenting, self-disclosure, perceived parental knowledge, and problem behavior. Results in a sample of 10th- to 12th-grade students, their parents, and their peers demonstrated that high responsiveness, high behavioral control, and low psychological control are independent predictors of self-disclosure. In addition, structural equation modeling analyses demonstrated that parenting is both indirectly (through self-disclosure) and directly associated with perceived parental knowledge but is not directly related to problem behavior or affiliation with peers engaging in problem behavior.