Novel Themes and Approaches in Research on Parenting in Adolescence

Although peers become increasingly influential in adolescence, parents remain important in supporting adolescents in their development. However, little is known about how parenting evolves across adolescence. Another issue is that research on associations between parenting and adolescent well-being, has treated parents as one, homogeneous group, thus neglecting possible differences between families. Also, little attention has been devoted to how parents, grandparents and adolescents perceive parenting. And finally, many studies have investigated the unidirectional effect of parenting on adolescent well-being, whereas it is equally interesting to explore how the parent-adolescent and parent-parent relationship may affect parental well-being. This symposium goes into these topics in different international contexts: Belgium (Flanders), The Netherlands, and China. In all four papers questionnaire data are used, and parenting is related to well-being. The papers include different family members' perceptions of parenting. The first two papers investigate whether parenting is similar across families and whether different groups of parents can be distinguished, by combining a person-centered and a variable-centered approach in a longitudinal study with yearly data waves. Five parenting dimensions are examined: Support and Proactive, Punitive, Harsh Punitive and Psychological Control. The first paper uses subspace K-means clustering, a novel data analytic method, that allows the identification of distinct parent groups, but also looks at the associations between parenting dimensions within each cluster. The second paper uses latent class growth analyses to distinguish different parenting trajectory classes. The third paper investigates parenting in a Chinese context, where grandparents play an important role in child-rearing. It is examined whether a five-factor parenting model shows measurement invariance across informants (young adolescents, mothers, fathers, and grandparents). In the fourth paper, the adolescent-parent relationship, co-parent relationship and coping strategies are related to parenting-related well-being.status: publishe