Background
During adolescence diabetes creates a juncture of very complex disease management demands with developmental needs, including the striving of adolescents for greater autonomy. Parents' concerns and fears about the teen's diabetes self-management abilities during this time can heighten parental attachment behavior and affect the parents' ability to support autonomy development necessary for effective self-care. Maternal parenting processes may be especially important for those adolescents who have Type 1 diabetes because mothers are the primary caregivers.
Purpose
Based on attachment theory, the aim was to test a model of the influence of mother-adolescent developmental conflict, maternal separation anxiety, and maternal inhibition of autonomy and relatedness on cognitive autonomy and self-care of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes.
Method
A total of 131 families with an adolescent, ages 11-15, contributed data annually across three waves. Mothers and adolescents completed paper-and-pencil measures and two interaction scenarios that were coded by trained staff from audio-tapes. The adolescent also completed a structured interview and questionnaire to assess self-care.
Results
Maternal separation anxiety when adolescents were 11-15 years of age directly predicted cognitive autonomy at one year follow-up, and that cognitive autonomy was directly related to self-care one year later, but did not mediate between separation anxiety and self-care.
Conclusions
Future investigation of the influence of separation anxiety of parents on adolescent autonomy development is warranted, as well as the contribution of autonomy development to diabetes self-management behaviors of adolescents.