EXAM 2 (Chapter 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 (246-254), 12 & Kaufman article)
H4 – FAMILIES
Family problems are no more likely to occur during adolescence than at other times in the life span. However, among
teenagers and parents who report having problems, the great majority had troubled relations during childhood, and declines
in the quality of family relationships in adolescence are greatest in families where relationships were less close to begin with.
When it comes to basic values (concerning religion, work, education, etc.), diversity within the adolescent population are
much more striking than are differences between generations. There is often a gap between teenagers and adults in matters
of taste, like styles of dress, music, and leisure activities. The most common sources of conflict between adolescents and
parents are everyday issues, such as time spent on schoolwork, household chores, and choice of friends. Teenagers and
parents define issues of contention differently: parents view issues as matters of right and wrong, and teenagers as matters
of personal choice.
Youngsters rarely rebel against their parents just for the sake of rebelling. Adolescents are willing to accept the rules of their
parents as legitimate when they agree that the issue is a moral one or an issue of safety. They tend to disagree when they see
the issue as a personal one. Conflict increases during early adolescence, because adolescents come to see more issues that
they previously saw as legitimate for their parents to regulate, as matters of personal choice. There is an increase, with age,
in adolescents’ willingness to lie to their parents, especially about matters the adolescent thinks are personal.
Family Relationships at Adolescence
The family systems theory is a perspective on family functioning that emphasizes interconnections among different family
relationships (such as marital, parent-child, sibling). According to this theory, relationships in families change most
dramatically during times when family members or the family’s circumstances are changing, because the family’s equilibrium
often is upset.
The Adolescent’s Parents at Midlife
Many parents are in their forties when their child reaches adolescence. A lot of people have difficulties with being in their
forties. Some theorists have called this a time of midlife crisis: a psychological crisis over identity believed to occur between
the ages of 35 and 45, the age range of most adolescents’ parents. When midlife meets adolescence there is a certain overlap
in crisis and this is likely to have an impact on family relationships:
Society has labeled adolescence as one of the most physically attractive, while parents start to feel increased
concern about their bodies and physical attractiveness.
Adults in midlife are starting to measure time in terms of how much longer they have to live, while people younger
than this measure time in terms of how long they have been alive. Adults in midlife are starting to feel that
possibilities for changing their lives are limited. Adults are reminded of mortality by seeing their own parents aging.
Adolescence is the time of endless possibilities, while midlife starts to be a time of accepting the consequences of
choices made earlier in life.
Parents’ mental health is worse when their children are living at home than it is once they have moved out, and when
children leave home, it is fathers who typically feel the greatest sense of loss.
Special Concerns of Immigrant Families
It varies across ethnic groups how adolescents and parents adjust, because certain cultures are more likely to stress family
obligations. Many immigrant families place a high value on familism: an orientation toward life in which the needs of one’s
family take precedence over the needs of the individual. Adolescents who value familism are more likely to develop prosocial
values, less likely to get depressed, and less likely to get involved with antisocial peer groups. When there are different
expectations between immigrant parents and teenagers, this leads to a source of stress, especially when the adolescent has
adopted values and expectations of the new country and the parents less. This is called generational dissonance: a
divergence of views between adolescents and parents that is common in families of immigrant parents and adolescents born
in America.
Transformations in Family Relations
All the transitions of adolescence; changes in midlife experienced by parents; and the changes the family experiences during
this stage set in motion a series of transformations in family relationships:
Changes in the balance of power. First adolescents try to play a more forceful role in the family and slowly with age
they have more power.
The role of puberty. Puberty seems to distance adolescents from their parents and there is more bickering.
Sons and daughters report comparable degrees of closeness to their parents, amounts of conflict, types of rules and patterns
of activity. Sons and daughters also interact with their parents in similar ways. Teenagers relate very differently to mothers
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,and fathers: adolescents tend to be closer to their mothers, and mothers tend to be more involved than fathers in their
adolescents’ lives. Adolescents also fight more often with their mothers and perceive mothers as more controlling.
Family Relationships and Adolescent Development
Two dimensions of the behavior of parents toward the adolescent are critical:
Parental responsiveness: the degree to which the parent responds to the child’s needs in an accepting, supportive
manner.
Parental demandingness: the degree to which the parent expects and demands mature, responsible behavior.
The possible combinations of these two dimensions lead to the following four styles of parenting:
Authoritative parents: parents who use warmth, firm control and rational, issue-oriented discipline, in which
emphasis is placed on the development of self-direction.
Authoritarian parents: parents who use punitive, absolute, and forceful discipline and who place a premium on
obedience and conformity.
Indulgent parents: parent who are characterized by responsiveness but low demandingness, and who are mostly
concerned with the happiness of the child.
Indifferent parents: parents who are characterized by low levels of both responsiveness and demandingness.
Adolescents seem to fare best with the authoritative style of parenting. Adolescents raised in authoritative homes are more
psychosocially mature, responsible, self-assured, creative, curious, socially skilled and academically successful. This seems to
be the case no matter the ethnicity, social class, and family structure of the family. Authoritative parenting is less prevalent
among Black, Asian, or Hispanic families than among White families, because parenting practices are often linked to cultural
values and beliefs. Ethnic minority parents are often more demanding than White parents.
Authoritative parenting is linked to healthy adolescent development because of a few reasons:
These parents provide an appropriate balance between restrictiveness and autonomy, giving the adolescent
opportunities to develop self-reliance while providing the standards, limits and guidelines that teenagers need.
These parents are more likely to engage their children in verbal give-and-take, they are likely to promote the sort of
intellectual development that provides an important foundation for the development of maturity.
Because authoritative parenting is based on a warm parent-child relationship, adolescents are more likely to form
strong attachments to these kind of parents, which makes them more open to their parents’ influence.
The child’s own behavior, temperament and personality shape parenting practices. Children who are responsible,
self-directed, curious, and self-assured elicit warmth, flexible guidance, and verbal give-and-take.
Adolescents rate their sibling relationships similarly to those with their parents in companionship and importance, but more
like friendship with respect to power, assistance, and their satisfaction with the relationship. Over the course of adolescence,
adolescents’ relationships with siblings, and especially younger siblings, become more egalitarian but also more distant and
less emotionally intense. In same-sex dyads, intimacy increases between preadolescence and middle adolescence, and then
declines somewhat. In mixed-sex dyads, the pattern is the opposite: intimacy drops between preadolescence and middle
adolescence, and then increases. By late adolescence, brothers and sisters are more close than same-sex siblings, although
both types of relationships become closer as individuals leave home and mature into young adulthood.
Genetic Influences on Adolescent Development
Behavioral genetics is the scientific study of genetic influences on behavior. Genetic influences is studied in three main ways:
Studying adolescents who are twins, to see whether identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins.
Studying adopted adolescents, to see whether adopted adolescents are more like their biological parents than like
their adoptive parents.
Studying adolescents and their sibling in stepfamilies, to see whether similarity between siblings varies with their
biological relatedness.
Molecular genetics is the scientific study of the structure and function of genes. These scientists have identified specific genes
that are linked to particular traits. Genetic markers for a wide range of traits and behavioral propensities such as aggression,
depression, impulsivity, and sensation seeking have been found.
Alleles are different versions of the same gene, which arise because of genetic mutations. These may guide development in
different directions.
Researches distinguish between two types of environmental influences in studies of genetic and environmental influences on
adolescent development:
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, Shared environmental influences: nongenetic influences that make individuals living in the same family similar to
each other.
Nonshared environmental influences: nongenetic influences in individuals’ lives that make them different from
people they live with.
Studies show that both genetic and nonshared environmental influences, such as differential parental treatment, peer
relations, and school experiences, are particularly strong in adolescence. In contrast, shared environmental factors, such as
family socioeconomic status or the neighborhood in which two siblings live, are less influential.
Genes may shape tendencies, but whether these tendencies are actualized often depends on the environment. The inverse is
also true. As a consequence of their genes, people who are exposed to the same environment may be affected differently.
The diathesis-stress model is a perspective on psychological disorders that posits that problems are the result of an
interaction between a preexisting condition (the diathesis) and exposure to stress in the environment.
The differential susceptibility theory is the idea that the same genetic tendencies that make an individual especially
susceptible to develop problems when exposed to adverse environmental influences also make him or her especially likely to
thrive when exposed to positive environmental influences. Thus, some people grow pretty much the same way in any
environment and others thrive under good conditions but languish under bad ones.
Siblings who grow up in the same family often turn out to be very different, because (1) two siblings may have inherited
different genes from their parents, and (2) siblings may have very different family experiences. This can be because they have
been treated differently by their parents, they perceive similar experiences in different ways, or because they grew up in the
same household at different times in the family’s life.
The Adolescent’s Family in a Changing Society
In many industrialized countries, the family has undergone a series of changes during the last 50 years that have diversified
its form and adolescents’ daily experiences:
Many marriages end up in divorce.
Single parenthood.
Remarriage.
A lot of adolescents grow up in poverty. One reason for the large disparity in poverty rates between White and non-
White children is the racial disparity in rates of single parenthood: because non-White children are more likely to be
raised in single-parent homes, they are more likely to be poor.
Adolescents and Divorce
Important findings of the impact of divorce on children are:
The effect of divorce is small in magnitude. Although divorce clearly diminishes youngsters’ well-being, the impact of
the divorce itself is small.
Quality matters. The quality of the relationships the child has with the important adults in his or her life matters
more than the number of parents present in the home.
Adaptation to divorce. It is the process of going through a divorce, not the resulting family structure, matters the
most for the mental health of the adolescent.
Conflict and stress. The negative effects of a divorce have more to do with other factors than having a single parent.
These include marital conflict, disrupted parenting, and increased stress in the household.
Genetic influences. Some of the effects of divorce are due to genetic influences.
Exposure to marital conflict, apart from and in addition to divorce itself, has harmful effects on children’s development:
Children are more adversely affected by marital conflict when they are aware of it than when it is hidden from them.
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