Adolescence and Family Dynamics

• The idea that an individual's behavior is influenced by others' expectations for them is known as self-fulfilling prophecy.

Family Dynamics

• Family problems are equally likely to occur during adolescence as at other stages of life.
• To understand adolescent development, the family should be viewed as a context. This involves understanding how family relationships change during adolescence, how adolescents are affected by their experiences in the family, and how changes in family life over the past half-century have affected the adolescent experience.

The Generation Gap

• Teens and parents generally share similar core beliefs regarding hard work, education, ambition, and personal values.
• Diversity within the adolescent population regarding core values is greater than the diversity between generations.
• Core beliefs are primarily shaped by socioeconomic, regional, and cultural backgrounds, which parents and adolescents share.
• Generation gaps exist more in personal tastes (style, music, leisure activities) than in core values.
• Basic values develop gradually and are shaped from an early age, whereas personal tastes change more rapidly due to peer influence and trends.
• Adolescents spend substantial time with friends, shaping their preferences outside the family.
• Teens and parents commonly argue over curfews, leisure time, and clothing, with disagreement topics being similar across ethnic groups and cultures.
• A primary contributor to parent-adolescent conflict is the difference in how they define issues. Parents may see issues as matters of right and wrong, while adolescents view them as matters of personal choice.
• Adolescents often accept parental rules as legitimate if they involve morality or safety but less so when viewed as personal choices.
• Adolescents see more issues as matters of personal choice, leading to increased conflict.
• Adolescents may view parents as controlling when they try to regulate what they regard as personal choices, which negatively impacts adolescent mental health.
• Feeling psychologically controlled by parents increases the likelihood of being oppositional.
• Differently, teens view parents wanting to know their whereabouts positively.
• Clashes occur over whether something is a matter of safety or a personal choice.
• Adolescents' understanding of family rules and regulations evolves alongside their reasoning abilities.

Family Relationships During Adolescence

• Adolescence brings change and reorganization in family relationships and daily interactions.
• Adolescents spend less time in family activities as they develop.
• The family systems theory emphasizes interconnections among family relationships (marital, parent-child, sibling).
• Family relationships undergo transformations during significant changes, upsetting the family's equilibrium.
• Midlife crisis: a psychological crisis over identity believed to occur between the ages of 35 and 45, the age range of most adolescents' parents.
• Parents become more concerned about their appearance, while adolescents experience rapid growth and attractiveness.
• Parents feel limited in changing their lives, while adolescents develop the capability to think systematically about the future.
• Adults tend to measure time in how much longer they have to live after midlife rather than how long they have been alive.
• Adolescents’ optimism clashes with the pragmatism of middle age, status, and relationships.
• Adults have fewer choices and reach an occupational plateau meaning they deal with discrepancies between aspirations and achievements.
• Parents may describe adolescence as the most difficult parenting stage and it is a low point in marital and life satisfaction because parental mental health impacts interactions with their children, affecting the teens.
• Family finances are often strained during adolescence coupled with families coping with the increasing importance of peer groups.
• How adolescents and parents adjust to shifts varies across ethnic groups.
• Familism: an orientation where family needs take precedence over individual needs.
• Adolescents who value and assist their families develop prosocial values and are less likely to be depressed or involved with antisocial peer groups.
• Generational dissonance: Divergence of views between adolescents and parents is common in immigrant families.

Transformations and Perceptions

• A movement occurs away from unchallenged parental authority to a more equal footing.
• Shifts towards egalitarian relationships begin in early adolescence.
• During early adolescence, young people try to play a more forceful role in the family but parents may not yet acknowledge adolescents’ input.
• Between 12-16, adolescents assert autonomy and conflict with parents is common.
• In middle adolescence, teens act and are treated more like adults which means they have more influence over family decisions and do not need to assert opinions through interruptions and other immature behavior.
• By ages 16-20, adolescents feel more independent, leading to improved relationships with parents.
• Family members must have a shared sense of what they’re experiencing and how they’re changing to adapt to these transformations.
• Adolescents and parents perceive their day-to-day experiences differently.
• Young adolescents are especially sensitive to emotional signals.
• Puberty affects changes and adolescents and parents bicker more and feel less close.
• Distance is manifested in increased privacy and less physical affection.
• Relationships become less conflicted and more intimate during late adolescence.

Gender and Family

• Differences in family relations of sons and daughters are minimal.
• Adolescents tend to be closer to mothers, spend more time with them, and feel more comfortable discussing emotional matters.
• Mothers are often more involved in adolescents’ lives.
• Fathers are perceived as distant authority figures consulted for objective information, not emotional support.
• Adolescents fight more with mothers, perceiving them as more controlling.
• Time spent with fathers is more predictive of adolescent social competence and self-worth.

Family Relationships and Adolescent Development

• Parenting styles impact adolescents differently.
• Children's behavior results from their parents' behavior, but adolescents also affect how their parents behave, creating a two-way street.
• The link between negative parenting and adolescent problem behavior is stronger among temperamentally impulsive teens.

Parenting Styles

• Parental responsiveness: Responding to a child's needs in an accepting, supportive manner.
• Parental demandingness: Expecting and insisting on mature, responsible behavior from the child.
• Four parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and indifferent.

Authoritative parenting

• High responsiveness and high demandingness.
• Emphasizes the development of self-direction.
• Raises psychosocially mature children who are responsible, self-assured, creative, curious, and socially skilled.
• Provides a balance between restriction and autonomy, fostering self-reliance and competence.
• Encourages verbal give-and-take, promoting intellectual development.
• Based on a warm parent-child relationship, fostering attachment.
• Shape parenting based on responsible, independent, and cooperative children.

Authoritarian parents

• High demandingness but low responsiveness.
• Punitive, absolute, and forceful discipline is used.
• Obedience and conformity are prioritized and restrict child's autonomy.
• Adolescents become more dependent, passive, less socially adept and self-assured, and less curious.

Indulgent parents

• High responsiveness but low demandingness.
• Accepting, benign, and passive in discipline.
• Demand very little, giving the child a high degree of freedom.
• Want to raise a happy child.
• Adolescents become less mature and responsible, and more peer-conforming.

Indifferent parents

• Low responsiveness and low demandingness.
• Minimize time and energy spent interacting with their child.
• Know little about the child's whereabouts and activities, showing little interest in their child's experiences.
• Structure home life around their own needs and interests.
• Adolescents are often impulsive and may engage in delinquent behavior.
• Neglectful or hostile parenting is harmful to adolescents' mental health and development, with severe psychological abuse having the gravest effects.
• The link between authoritative parenting and healthy adolescent development is consistent across ethnicities, social classes, family structures, and cultures.
• authoritative parenting is less prevalent among Black, Asian, and/or Hispanic families compared to White families.
• Ethnic minority parents are frequently more demanding.
• High demandingness parenting may foster academic achievement but also increases teenagers anxiety and distress if taken to extreme.
• Protective/strict-affectionate is a parenting style used in many Asian families that differs from authoritarian parenting and does not have the same negative impact
• Families with psychologically competent teenagers permit family members to express autonomy and individuality while remaining emotionally connected.
• Adolescents whose autonomy is suppressed are at risk of depression and low self-esteem.
• Adolescents thrive in family atmospheres that allow the development of individuality within close family ties.

Adolescents’ Relationships with Siblings

• Sibling relationships during adolescence are unique from relationships with parents or friends.
• Siblings are rated similarly to parents in companionship and importance, but more like friends in power, assistance, and satisfaction.
• Sibling relationships are emotionally charged, including conflict, rivalry, nurturance, and support.
• Conflict with siblings increases from childhood to early adolescence.
• Relationships with siblings become more egalitarian over adolescence.
• Same-sex dyads: Intimacy increases between early and middle adolescence, then declines.
• Mixed-sex dyads: Intimacy drops between early and middle adolescence, then increases.
• The quality of the parent-adolescent relationship influences the quality of sibling relations.
• Children and adolescents learn much about social relationships from sibling interactions, influencing other relationships.

Genetic Influences on Adolescent Development

• Family influences adolescent development through inherited genes.
• Behavioral genetics: Study of genetic influences on behavior.
• Researchers examine genetic influences through twin studies, adoption studies, and stepfamily studies.
• Molecular genetics: Study of the structure and function of genes and has allowed the identification of specific genes associated with particular traits.
• Alleles: different versions of the same gene.

Genetic and Environmental Influences

• Shared environmental influences: Non-genetic influences that make individuals in the same family similar (e.g., family SES, neighborhood).
• Nonshared environmental influences: Non-genetic influences that make individuals different (e.g., differential parental treatment, peer relations, school experiences).
• Genetic and nonshared environmental influences are particularly strong in adolescence.
• Genetic factors influence qualities like aggression and are linked to various emotional and behavioral problems.
• Intelligence in adolescence is also under strong genetic control.
• Genes may shape tendencies, but the environment determines whether these tendencies are realized.
• People exposed to the same environment may be affected differently due to their genes.
• Diathesis-stress model: Problems result from an interaction between a pre-existing condition (diathesis) and exposure to stress and most commonly used to explain depression.
• Differential susceptibility theory: Genetic tendencies make individuals susceptible to problems in adverse environments but also likely to thrive in positive ones. Some genes are more malleable.
• some are dandelions meaning they grow pretty much the same way in any environment while others are orchids meaning they thrive under good conditions but languish under bad ones.

Why Are Siblings So Different

• Siblings, unless identical twins, may inherit different genes from their parents for certain traits.
• Siblings have different family experiences such as they are treated differently by parents or perceive similar experiences differently
• Sibling relationships are strained when differential treatment is perceived as unfair.
• Siblings get differential treatment perceived as fair because it makes them feel unique and lessens sibling rivalry.
• Sibling rivalry: competition between siblings, often for parental attention.
• Siblings may turn out differently if they have divergent experiences outside the home.

The Adolescents Family in a Changing Society

• The divorce rate increased from the 1960s, peaked in the 80s, and has declined since the 90s.
• Comparing rates today versus those from the past is difficult because marriage rates have also declined and more couples are cohabiting.
• Cohabiting parents: associated with an increased rate of antisocial behavior among children and less common among college grads.
• Most divorces occur early in a marriage.
• Single parenthood: Mostly with the mother.
• Black youth are more likely to be born outside of marriage and see parental divorce and less likely to see parents remarriage which means they spend longer periods of time in single parent households.
• Remarriage: Roughly two-thirds of divorced men and half of divorced women remarry.
• Most adolescents whose parents separate also live in a stepfamily at some time.
• The divorce rate is higher for second marriages than first.
• Adolescents are adversely affected by having to move too frequently.
• 20% of adolescents in the US grow up in abject poverty.
• The socioeconomic divide growing between rich and poor.
• Poverty is more common among non-white individuals.
• Because non-white children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes, they are more likely to be poor.
• Discussing causes and effects for the above factors is difficult because the conditions under which these factors take place varies tremendously from family to family.
• Its relatively easy to generalize about the effects of poverty as almost always negative.
• Variations within different family structures are likely more important than differences among them.

Adolescents and Divorce

• Most researchers agree that adolescents from divorced homes have more difficulties, but the magnitude of the effect is small.
• Although divorce diminishes children’s well-being, the impact of divorce itself is small.
• Effects are strongest among school-aged children and in countries where divorce is less common and more stigmatized.
• Quality of relationships with important adults matters more than the number of parents in the home.
• Single-parent families without divorce have fewer difficulties than those with divorce or remarriage and two-parent homes dont always have warm and close relationships with their kids.
• the process of the negative affect the adolescent undergoes is divorce, not the resulting family structure.
• The period of greatest difficulty is around the time of the divorce because the majority adjust to the change and resemble peers whose parents stayed married.
• Adverse consequences of divorce can be linked to factors not specifically due to having a single parent, such as exposure to marital conflict, disorganized or disrupted parenting, and increased stress in the household.
• The most important pathway is its disruptive impact on parenting.

Genetic Influences

• Some apparent effects of divorce result from exposure to stressors, genetic differences exist between adolescents from divorced and non-divorced families. Those differences may account for part of this.
• Adults who divorce differ from those who don’t regarding traits with strong genetic origins.
• One reason is that they inherited some of the traits that influenced their parents to get divorced.

Individual Differences in the Effects of Divorce

• Immediate problems are more common among boys and younger children and those with difficult temperaments.
• These problems occur to children lacking supportive relationships with adults outside the family and those transitioning into adolescence.
• Social support is especially important for children growing up in single-parent homes, including relatives.
• The impact of divorce on adolescent adjustment is weaker among Black adolescents.

Marital Conflict

• At least some of the differences between adolescents from divorced versus non-divorced homes were present before the divorce because children in households that later divorced were exposed to higher levels of marital unhappiness, conflict, and strained parent-child relationships.
• Exposure to marital conflict has harmful effects on children’s development and it is especially harmful when its hostile, physically violent, or frightening.
• Children are more negatively affected when marital conflict leads to feelings of insecurity or self-blame.
• Marital conflict more adversely affects the adolescent when the conflict disrupts the quality of the parent-child relationship.

Long Term Effects of Divorce

• Individuals whose parents divorced during preadolescence and adolescence demonstrate adjustment difficulties later. Known as sleeper effects.
• One factor is those whose parent divorced may surface until adolescence. Adolescence the time when individuals first experiment with dating someone exclusively.
• Effects may not be manifested until the adolescents begins dating and involved in romantic relationships because divorce or marital conflict affects views of romantic commitment.

Custody, Contact, and Conflict

• The nature of the relationship between adolescents' divorced parents, not custody, is the key factor and other important factor are also important.
• Whether ex-spouses continue to fight and place the child between them.
• Whether the adolescent’s discipline is consistent across the two households.
• Adolescents who have regular contact with their father after a divorce have fewer problems.
• However important than a fathers involvement is the level of conflict between parents and nature of adolescents relationship with father before and after divorce.
• Adolescents benefit when parental conflict is minimal but suffer when conflict is intense.
• Financial support from fathers is associated with less problem behavior and higher academic achievement.

Remarriage

• Adolescents in stepfamilies often have more problems than peers.
• Youth in stepfamilies are more likely to be involved in delinquent activity than those single parent homes, and stepfamilies bring a potential exposure double dose of marital conflict between normal parent and stepparent
• Additional conflict potentially occurs from blending children from different marriages
• Short-term effects of remarriage vary among children. Girls and older children have more difficulty adjusting, while boys and younger children have more to gain from a mothers remarriage.
• Adolescents growing up in stepfamilies have more problems than their peers.

Economic Stress and Poverty

• Income loss is associated with disruptions in parenting, leading to increases in adolescent difficulties.
• Family stress model: Financial strain increases parents' depression and anxiety, worsens marriages, and causes conflicts, which then makes parents more irritable and negatively affect the quality of their parenting.
• Chronic poverty is especially damaging.

Special Family Forms

• Foster care: A temporary living arrangement when a child’s parents are not able to provide care, nurturance, or safety.
• Parental maltreatment and delinquency are reasons adolescents enter foster care system.
• Adolescents in foster care are at greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems.
• There is considerable diversity among families with adolescents, yet no factor seems to influence adjustment more than the quality of relationships at home.