Between‐ and within‐person predictors of children’s information management following rule violations

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to better understand both why some children disclose more about their misbehavior to their parents than do other children, as well as why a child discloses to parents about misbehavior in some situations but not in others. Analyses test parental warmth, children's beliefs regarding the legitimacy of parental authority and their own obligation to disclose misbehavior, and parent's responses to children's disclosure of disagreement with parents’ rules and children's misbehavior as predictors of both between‐person and within‐person variations in disclosing and revealing forms of information management. Parent‐child dyads (n = 218) were interviewed during the summers following the child's 5th (M age = 11.9 years) and 6th grade school years. Feeling obligated to disclose rule violations and believing that parents have legitimate authority to impose rules across more topics explained why some children reveal more and conceal less from parents than do other children. Children were more likely to conceal information about the specific topics for which they felt less obligated to disclose rule violations and following rule violations in areas in which their parents previously punished rule violations.

Authoritative Parenting and Adolescents’ Digital Citizenship Behaviors: Sequential Mediation of Parental Fairness and Self-Disclosure

“…Parents struggle to monitor their children's digital activities [33], often leading them to be unaware of online behaviors [1,74]. Although, to our knowledge, no study has explored the predictors of adolescents' self-disclosure of their online behaviors with parents, some related studies [51,75,76,77,78,79,80,81] suggest that authoritative parenting and adolescents' perception of the appropriateness of parenting are associate with adolescents' self-disclosure of o ine behaviors as well [76, 77,80].…”

Longitudinal associations between adolescent information management and mother–teen relationship quality: Between- versus within-family differences.

“…The potential divergence of between-family and within-family processes, referred to as Simpson’s Paradox when the processes are opposite in direction (Kievit, Frankenhuis, Waldorp, & Borsboom, 2013), has received renewed attention within parenting and family process research (Dietvorst et al, 2018; Keijsers, 2016; Keijsers et al, 2016; Laird & Zeringue, 2019; Rekker, Keijsers, Branje, Koot, & Meeus, 2017). Using random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM), Keijsers and colleagues demonstrated that disclosure and delinquency are negatively correlated at the between- but not the within-person level (Keijsers, 2016) and that privacy invasion and secrecy are positively related at the between-person level but negatively related at the within-person level (Dietvorst et al, 2018).…”