Parental monitoring, adolescent dishonesty and underage drinking: A nationally representative study

Abstract

Little research has connected underage drinking with adolescent information management strategies. The present study uses longitudinal analyses to theoretically link adolescent lying with parental "monitoring knowledge," and, in turn, with prospective adolescent drinking, in a large nationally representative sample of U.S. seventh-and eighth-graders (N ¼ 4020). Structural equation modeling evaluated and supported, two key hypotheses:(1) dishonesty promotes future alcohol use by decreasing parental monitoring knowledge, and (2) dishonesty directly predicts alcohol consumption independent of its effects on parental monitoring. Maternal warmth and adolescent satisfaction with maternal relationships, but not parental control, were associated with lessened lying, and predicted parental monitoring and underage drinking. Our data implicate the role of adolescent agency for parental monitoring and highlight advantages of cohesive as opposed to overrestrictive parenting.

Understanding the development of honesty in children through the domains‐of‐socialization approach

“…Adolescents who perceive their parents as controlling are less likely to internalize the value of honesty and more likely to identify costs to telling the truth, which leads to more lie‐telling (Bureau & Mageau, 2014). Adolescents also feel more justified in telling lies when their parents are controlling, as they perceive lie‐telling as a method to gain autonomy (Jensen et al, 2004; Lushin, Jaccard, & Kaploun, 2017). Altogether, studies investigating the impact of controlling parenting suggest that a controlling parental style is detrimental to the socialization of honesty in children.…”

How Do Adolescents Manage Information in the Relationship with Their Parents? A Latent Class Analysis of Disclosure, Keeping Secrets, and Lying

“…Finally, as presented above for disclosure, the associations between structure and concealment strategies are also less consistent. For example, some studies showed that adolescents whose parents set rules and limits (e.g., Jensen et al, 2004 ) were more likely to lie, whereas others have found no statistically significant links between structure and lying (e.g., Lushin et al, 2017 ).…”

“…It should be noted that these cross-sectional associations could potentially reflect the fact that adolescents’ information management not only contributes to and reinforces certain behavioral patterns, but is also shaped by these behavioral patterns (Marshall et al, 2005 ). For example, longitudinal studies have shown that higher levels of disclosure predicted less hazardous drinking over time (Stavrinides et al, 2010 ), whereas higher levels of lying predicted more frequent drinking (Lushin et al, 2017 ). In addition, bidirectional associations were also found, with lower levels of kept secrets being associated with less frequent drinking over time, and frequent drinking being associated with greater subsequent secrets (McCann et al, 2016 ).…”

Developmental Changes in Secrecy During Middle Adolescence: Links with Alcohol Use and Perceived Controlling Parenting

“…Instead, scholars primarily examined the relation between the propensity to withhold information (e.g., keeping secrets, lying) at a given year and the level of alcohol use one or two years later, and vice versa. These studies demonstrated that higher levels of secrecy (McCann et al, 2016) and lies (Lushin et al, 2017) were associated with more frequent subsequent alcohol use among middle-aged adolescents.…”