Good can be stronger than bad: the daily relationship among maternal warmth, mother-teen conflict and adolescents’ self-esteem

Abstract

Self-esteem is associated with adaptive adolescent outcomes but tends to decline in adolescence. Parent-teen warmth has been linked to concurrent increases in adolescents' self-esteem while adolescents' conflict with parents is detrimental to their self-esteem in cross-sectional or longitudinal studies. However, it is unknown how adolescents experience of maternal warmth and conflict with mothers are correlated with their daily self-esteem, and whether these associations vary in adolescents' gender, age and family subjective socioeconomic status (SES) from the perspective of Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) theory. To address this gap, 293 adolescents (M age = 13.88 years, SD = .62) were recruited from a school, reporting their daily experience of maternal warmth, conflict with mothers and self-esteem by answering checklists for up to 7 days. Multilevel analysis showed that adolescents reported significantly higher self-esteem on days they experienced more warmth or less conflict with mothers than usual. Moreover, maternal warmth was linked to next-day self-esteem positively, yet mother-teen conflict not shown this spill-over effect. Gender, age and subjective SES did not moderate all the daily associations among mother-teen warmth, conflict and self-esteem. Findings suggest that mother-teen interactions play both protective and detrimental role in adolescents' daily self-image and that "good" interaction goes a longer way than "bad" one.

Parental differential treatment of siblings linked with internalizing and externalizing behavior: A meta‐analysis

“…Differences in parenting, regardless of form, may spur social comparisons between siblings (Jensen et al, 2015;Scholte et al, 2007) or may engender family conflict and strife (Kowal et al, 2004;Kowal & Kramer, 1997). This finding is in stark contrast to research on parenting in general which suggests that some domains may be more salient than others (Coffey et al, 2022;Lam et al, 2018;Wu et al, 2022). More work will need to continue in this area and examine how perceptions of fairness (Kowal et al, 2002;Kowal & Kramer, 1997) may further interact with the domain of parenting.…”

“…These include affection (Atzaba-Poria & Pike, 2008;Shanahan et al, 2008), conflict (Feinberg & Hetherington, 2001;Shanahan et al, 2008), resources (Jensen et al, 2013;McHale et al, 2005), control or autonomy (Sheehan & Noller, 2002;Tamrouti-Makkink et al, 2004), and measures focused on overall PDT (Coldwell et al, 2008;Rolan & Marceau, 2018). The broader parenting literature suggests that not all aspects of parenting are equal in their links with child and adolescent outcomes (Coffey et al, 2022;Lam et al, 2018;Wu et al, 2022). For example, Dhondt et al (2019) found that parental conflict was linked to more internalizing and externalizing behavior among children and adolescents, but parental positivity was not at all linked to those behaviors.…”