Adolescent Triangulation into Parental Conflicts: Longitudinal Implications for Appraisals and Adolescent-Parent Relations

Although triangulation into parental conflict is a risk factor for child and adolescent maladjustment, little is known about how triangulation affects adolescents’ functioning or the factors that lead children to be drawn into parental disagreements. This prospective study examined the relations between triangulation, appraisals of conflict, and parent-child relations in a sample of 171 adolescents, ages 14 to 19 years, at 2 time points. Cross-lagged path analyses revealed that youths who experienced greater threat in response to conflict reported increases in triangulation over time, and triangulation was associated with increased self-blame and diminished parent-adolescent relations. This study highlights links between intrapersonal, dyadic, and triadic processes and suggests a mechanism by which interparental discord spills over into parent-adolescent relations

Emotional, Cognitive, and Family Systems Mediators of Children\u27s Adjustment to Interparental Conflict

Emotional, cognitive, and family systems processes have been identified as mediators of the association between interparental conflict and children\u27s adjustment. However, little is known about how they function in relation to one another because they have not all been assessed in the same study. This investigation examined the relations among children\u27s exposure to parental conflict, their appraisals of threat and blame, their emotional reaction, and triangulation into parental disagreements. One hundred fifty ethnically diverse 8- to 12-year-old children and both of their parents participated in the study. Comparisons of 3 models proposing different relations among these processes indicated that they function as parallel and independent mediators of children\u27s adjustment. Specifically, children\u27s self-blaming attributions and emotional distress were uniquely associated with both internalizing and externalizing problems, whereas perceived threat uniquely predicted internalizing problems and triangulation uniquely predicted externalizing problems

Capturing the Family Context of Emotion Regulation: A Family Systems Model Comparison Approach

Several dimensions of family functioning are recognized as formative influences on children’s emotion regulation. Historically, they have been studied separately, limiting our ability to understand how they function within the family system. The present investigation tested models including family emotional climate, interparental conflict, and maternal and paternal warmth and emotional support in relation to children’s emotion regulation, using a multimethod, multi-informant design with 150 ethnically diverse two-parent families. Mother, father, and child surveys and observational techniques were used to assess the variables of interest. Three theoretically informed comprehensive models were tested and compared. The best fitting model highlighted positive family climate and maternal warmth and sensitivity as unique predictors. Interparental conflict was indirectly linked with children’s emotion regulation through both processes. This study underscores the value of evaluating family-wide, interparental, and parenting dimensions within a broader family systems model to gain a more complete understanding of children’s regulation

Stepfamily Relationship Quality and Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Problems

The stepfamily literature is replete with between-group analyses by which youth residing in stepfamilies are compared to youth in other family structures across indicators of adjustment and well-being. Few longitudinal studies examine variation in stepfamily functioning to identify factors that promote the positive adjustment of stepchildren over time. Using a longitudinal sample of 191 stepchildren (56% female, mean age = 11.3 years), the current study examines the association between the relationship quality of three central stepfamily dyads (stepparent–child, parent–child, and stepcouple) and children's internalizing and externalizing problems concurrently and over time. Results from path analyses indicate that higher levels of parent–child affective quality are associated with lower levels of children's concurrent internalizing and externalizing problems at Wave 1. Higher levels of stepparent–child affective quality are associated with decreases in children's internalizing and externalizing problems at Wave 2 (6 months beyond baseline), even after controlling for children's internalizing and externalizing problems at Wave 1 and other covariates. The stepcouple relationship was not directly linked to youth outcomes. Our findings provide implications for future research and practice

Knowledge Lability: Within-Person Changes in Parental Knowledge and Their Associations with Adolescent Problem Behavior

Higher levels of parental knowledge about youth activities has been associated with lower levels of youth risky behavior. Yet little is known about how parental knowledge fluctuates during early adolescence and how those fluctuations are associated with the development of problem behavior. We use the term lability to describe within-person fluctuations in knowledge over time with higher lability indicating greater fluctuations in knowledge from year-to-year. This longitudinal study of rural adolescents (N = 840) investigated if change in parental knowledge across four waves of data from Grades 6 to 8 is characterized by lability, and if greater lability is associated with higher youth substance use, delinquency, and internalizing problems in Grade 9. Our models indicated that only some of the variance in parental knowledge was accounted for by developmental trends. The remaining residual variance reflects within-person fluctuations around these trends, lability, plus measurement and occasion-specific error. Even controlling for level and developmental trends in knowledge, higher knowledge lability (i.e., more fluctuation) was associated with increased risk for later alcohol and tobacco use, and for girls, higher delinquency and internalizing problems. Our findings suggest that lability in parental knowledge has unique implications for adolescent outcomes. The discussion focuses on mechanisms that may link knowledge lability to substance use. Interventions may be most effective if they teach parents to consistently and predictably decrease knowledge across early adolescence

Triangulation and Parent–Adolescent Relationships: Implications for Adolescent Dating Competence and Abuse

This study focuses on family predictors of conflict behavior in adolescent dating relationships, drawing on family systems and socialization perspectives. Mother–adolescent, father–adolescent, and triadic relationships each was examined as predictors of adolescent dating outcomes that hold importance for developmental and prevention science (positive conflict resolution, verbal abuse, and physical abuse). We conducted a longitudinal analysis using a 6-month longitudinal design with 236 ethnically diverse high school students. Findings indicate that triangulation into parental conflicts was related to increases in positive conflict resolution and with increases in verbally abusive behavior with dating partners over time. Parent–adolescent closeness and conflict each was related to positive conflict resolution and verbal abuse, but these associations were only found for boys

Hostile Interactions in the Family: Patterns and Links to Youth Externalizing Problems

In line with family systems theory, we examined patterns of hostile interactions within families and their associations with externalizing problems among early-adolescent children. Using hostility scores based on observational data of six dyadic interactions during a triadic interaction (n = 462; i.e., child-to-mother, mother-to-child, child-to-father, father-to-child, mother-to-father, father-to-mother)—latent profile analysis supported three distinct profiles of hostility. The low/moderate hostile profile included families with the lowest levels of hostility across dyads; families in the mutual parent-child hostile profile scored higher on parent-child hostility, but lower on interparental hostility; the hostile parent profile showed higher levels of parent-to-child and interparental hostility, but lower child-to-parent hostility. Concerning links to youth outcomes, youth in the mutual parent-child hostile profile reported the highest level of externalizing problems, both concurrently and longitudinally. These results point to the importance of examining larger family patterns of hostility to fully understand the association between family hostility and youth adjustment

Beyond the parent-child dyad: Testing family systems influences on children\u27s emotion regulation

Emotion regulation is a central process across the lifespan. It shapes our everyday experiences, modulating emotions such as happiness, joy, anger, sadness, and fear, and holds important clinical implications for psychological adjustment, social functioning, and academic achievement. This importance makes it valuable to understand the social processes that mold one\u27s patterns of emotion regulation. For children, the primary context of emotional development is the family. Past research has highlighted the role of parenting influences on emotion regulation; however, less is known about the role broader family factors play. This study presents a family systems model of emotion regulation, including mother-child, father-child, interparental, and family-wide processes to better understand the context in which it develops. This study presents data from 150 families of children aged 8-12 and draws from mother, father, child, and observed measures of family, parent, and child functioning. Analyses were conducted comparing three theoretical models: a unique predictors model, an interparental indirect effects model, and a family as context for parenting model. Comparisons of these models provided support for the interparental indirect effects model as the best fit with the data. This model finds that interparental functioning is indirectly associated with children\u27s emotion regulation through mother-child, father-child, and family-wide processes. This model also found that maternal warmth and emotionally supportive parenting, higher levels of family positive emotional climate, and lower levels of family negative emotional climate were associated with the most adaptive emotion regulation functioning

Emotional Processes in the Family: Context for Interparental Conflict

Drawing from family systems theory, this study examines the role of family emotional processes as contextual factors that shape children\u27s appraisals and adjustment associated with interparental conflict. Two emotional processes were examined as family contextual factors for children\u27s experiences with interparental conflict: 1) family emotional expressiveness (emotional climate); and 2) parents reactions to children\u27s negative emotions. Data were collected from a culturally diverse sample of 144 children ages 8-12 years old and their parents. Results provided support for the family emotional climate as a contextual factor for children\u27s self-blaming attributions. Family negativity was found to exacerbate children\u27s maladjustment associated with interparental conflict. Finally, mothers\u27 and fathers\u27 responses to children\u27s negative affect moderated the association between interparental conflict and children\u27s self-blaming appraisals. The implications of these findings are discussed

Beyond the Parent-Child Dyad: Testing Family Systems Influences on Children\u27s Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is a central process for nearly every aspect of human functioning. It is instrumental for attending to, interpreting, understanding, and assigning meaning to events, whether they are common occurrences, or once in a lifetime events. Emotion regulation is the process that modulates the emotions that are constantly in flux; it plays an equally critical role in the way people cope with distressing experiences and the way we experience the happiest, most shining moments of their lives. Because the regulation of emotions is central to such a breadth of human lives, it is easy to understand why emotion regulation has received considerable attention in the research literature as an important individual, developmental and clinical process. Emotion regulation has important clinical implications. The ways in which children learn to manage their emotions shapes their psychological functioning, such as externalizing problems (Eisenberg et al., 2003; 2005) and internalizing problems (Eisenberg et al., 2001a). Children\u27s emotion regulation capacity also has important developmental and social implications, including the development of empathy and prosocial behavior (Valiente et al., 2004), peer relationships (Davidov & Grusec, 2006), and peer victimization (Hanish et al., 2004). Given the implications that emotion regulation has for our emotional and psychological well-being, there is good reason to devote considerable resources to understanding how adaptive emotion regulation functioning develops and what factors facilitate its\u27 growth. Early conceptualizations of emotion regulation emphasized individual characteristics such as temperament and personality as core factors in its development (for a review, see Fox, 1994). Thus, a driving assumption was that emotion regulation was a trait-like construct and research frequently ignored other processes involved in its development. More recently, emotion regulation research has broadened to recognize a variety of environmental factors that are formative influences on children\u27s emotion regulation capabilities. Of the environmental variables, parent-child processes have received the most attention. Consistent with much parenting research, father influences have been widely overlooked and when studied, fathers and mothers have been examined in separate statistical analyses. This approach reflects a critical limitation because it inaccurately compartmentalizes parenting processes in children\u27s lives. In addition, the focus on dyadic analyses of parent-child processes ignores other family factors, family members, or the relative influences of these family variables on children\u27s emotion regulation..