A Longitudinal Examination of Perceived Parent Behavior and Positive Youth Development: Child-Driven Effects

Abstract

The advent of the 21st Century brought a new interest in promoting Positive Youth Development and a renewed emphasis on understanding transactional relations between parenting and adolescent development. The present study examined conventional parent-driven pathways, which describe the putative role of parents in the formation of positive characteristics in children, as well as the prospect of child-driven effects, which describe how parents respond to evidence of Positive Youth Development by potentially increasing support and reducing psychological control. We tested these pathways in a sample of 458 Lithuanian adolescents (52.2% girls; M = 15.14 years old at the outset) who completed surveys assaying perceptions of parent behaviors and self-reports of positive development (character, competence, connection, caring, and confidence) at annual intervals from ages 15–18. Across most lags, children’s perceptions of parenting changed in response to their own positive development with increased support and decreased psychological control. In contrast, there were no longitudinal associations from perceptions of parenting to subsequent Positive Youth Development. The results offer insight into parenting in the 21st Century, a time when youth are increasingly encouraged/required to acquire volunteer experiences designed to promote positive development. To the extent that these experiences are successful, one unexpected offshoot may be better relationships with parents.

Parental control and adolescent internet addiction: the moderating effect of parent-child relationships

“…However, child self-report of parenting is widely adopted in parenting studies. Many scholars endorse the advantages of this method because the parent report is not necessarily more accurate than the child report, and it is how children interpret (or perceive) parental behaviors that dictate their adjustment and development ( 70 , 71 ). In addition, evidence also showed that the associations between parenting and adolescent developmental outcomes were not unduly influenced by common method variance ( 72 ).…”

Validation of a Chinese Positive Youth Development Scale: Dimensionality and Factorial Invariance

“…In addition to gender differences, it is also a common practice that PYD research investigates longitudinal development of adolescents' PYD attributes (Hull et al, 2021;Kaniušonytė et al, 2021). Adolescence is associated with rapid biological, neurological, and cognitive development (Widaman et al, 2010).…”

Validation of a Chinese Positive Youth Development Scale: Dimensionality and factorial invariance

“…In addition to gender differences, it is also a common practice that PYD research investigates longitudinal development of adolescents' PYD attributes [71,72]. Adolescence is associated with rapid biological, neurological, and cognitive development [35].…”