Employing Goffman's [(1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday and Company] notion of impression management, adolescents’ conveyance of information about their whereabouts and activities to parents was assessed employing two methodologies. First, a two‐wave panel design with a sample of 121 adolescents was used to test a model of information management incorporating two forms of information regulation (lying and willingness to disclose), adolescents’ perception of their parents’ knowledge about their activities, and adolescent misconduct. Path analysis was used to examine the model for two forms of misconduct as outcomes: substance use and antisocial behaviours. Fit indices indicate the path models were all good fits to the data. Second, 96 participants’ responses to semi‐structured questions were analyzed using a qualitative analytic technique. Findings reveal adolescents withhold or divulge information in coordination with their parents, employ impression management techniques, and try to balance safety issues with preservation of the parent–adolescent relationship.
The purpose of this study was to test a process model of youths' information management. Using three waves of longitudinal data collected from 982 youths, we modeled parents' positive and negative reactions to disclosure predicting youths' feelings about their parents, in turn predicting youths' disclosure and secrecy about their daily activities. Gender, age, and psychopathic personality traits were examined as potential moderators. The results showed that parents' negative reactions were associated with increases in youths' feeling controlled and decreases in youths' feeling connected to their parents, which in turn, predicted increased secrecy and decreased disclosure. In contrast, parents' positive reactions predicted increased feeling connected to parents, which in turn predicted increased disclosure. Moreover, these predictive pathways were modified by youths' psychopathic personality traits. Our results are consistent with a transactional model suggesting that how parents react to youths' disclosure affects youths' future decisions to provide their parents with information about their daily activities. The results point to the importance of considering youths' feelings and characteristics.
Previous research has shown a consistent positive association between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms. However, the direction of the effects has not been examined. To understand whether non-suicidal self-injury predicts depressive symptoms or vice versa, we examined the relations between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms across three waves of self-report data collected 1 year apart from 506 Swedish adolescents (47% girls; M age = 13.21; SD = .57) who were attending 7th grade at the onset of the study. The results suggest that depressive symptoms predict increases in non-suicidal self-injury 1 year later between the first and second waves of the study. Between the second and third waves of the study depressive symptoms and non-suicidal self-injury were significantly correlated indicating co-occurrence with no direction of effect rather than depressive symptoms predicting non-suicidal self-injury or vice versa. Group comparisons revealed no differences for boys and girls. The findings help clarify the relationships between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms during middle adolescence.
Recognizing that adolescents providing or withholding information about their activities is a strong predictor of parental knowledge, this article compares several ideas about what prompts adolescents to disclose information or keep secrets from their parents. Using a sample of 874 Northern European adolescents (aged 12-16 years; 49.8 % were girls), modified cross-lagged models examined parental monitoring (solicitation and monitoring rules), adolescent delinquency, and perceived parental support as predictors and consequences of adolescents disclosing to parents or keeping secrets, with adolescents' acceptance of parental authority as a moderator. Results suggest that, when adolescents view their parents as supportive, they subsequently disclose more and keep fewer secrets. Engaging in delinquent behavior was related reciprocally to keeping secrets. By comparison, the results generally did not support the idea that adolescents who are monitored provide information to parents, even when they accept parental authority. These results suggest that relationship dynamics and adolescents' delinquent behaviors play an important role in adolescents' information management.
Recent research suggests that youths interpret parental control and that this may have implications for how control affects youths' adjustment. In this study, we propose that youths' feelings about being over-controlled by parents and feeling connected to parents are intermediary processes linking parental control and youths' adjustment. We used three years of longitudinal data sampled from 1,022 Swedish youths in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade (47.3% girls; 12-17 years old, M age = 14.28 years, SD = .98) who were mainly Swedish in ethnic origin. We tested models linking parental control (i.e., rules, restriction of freedom, and coldness-rejection) to adjustment (i.e., norm-breaking, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem) through youths feeling over-controlled by and connected to parents. The overall model incorporating youths' feelings showed that restrictions and coldness-rejection were both indirectly linked to increases in norm-breaking and depressive symptoms through increases in youths feeling over-controlled. Parental rules still independently predicted decreases in norm-breaking and in self-esteem, and coldness-rejection predicted increases in norm-breaking. In addition, some paths (e.g., feeling over-controlled to self-esteem) depended on the youths' age, whereas others depended on their gender. These results suggest that when youths' feelings are taken into account, all behavioral control is not the same, and the line between behavioral control and psychological control is blurred. We conclude that it is important to consider youths' feelings of being controlled and suggest that future research focus more on exploring this idea.
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