Focus on the Dimensional approaches on Parenting.

In response to the cultural critiques of parenting styles, current research focuses on discrete dimensions of parenting, providing greater specificity in understanding parenting effects. For instance, behavioral control has been distinguished from psychological control and parental knowledge. 

Psychological control 

Psychological control, which is characteristic of authoritarian parenting, includes parental intrusiveness, guilt induction, and love withdrawal and is associated across cultures with internalizing and externalizing problems. Barber and his colleagues have identified parental disrespect as the specific mechanism causing these negative effects and have demonstrated that disrespect accounts for more of the variance in maladjustment than psychological control, broadly measured. Other than agreeableness, there is little evidence that personality variables moderate associations between psychological control and problem behavior. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), Soenens and Vansteenkiste proposed a narrower conceptualization of psychological control as internally pressuring parenting, or conditional approval through manipulation of feelings of guilt, shame, and separation anxiety (rather than external pressure from punishment, rewards, or removing privileges). Controlling parenting was associated with more oppositional defiance, need frustration, and in turn, internalizing and externalizing problems than was autonomy-supportive parenting. Finally, others have proposed that parental psychological control involves intrusions into adolescents’ personal domain, leading to feelings of overcontrol and in turn, maladjustment. 

Behavioral control 

In contrast to psychological control, appropriate levels of behavioral control guide and regulate children’s behavior by providing clear, consistent parental expectations and the structure to facilitate competent and responsible.  Behavioral control includes setting high standards and making and enforcing rules through supervision and monitoring. However, at high levels, behavioral and psychological control become blurred, causing detrimental effects for development.

 The “monitoring debate” 

Parental monitoring has been viewed as preventing adolescent problem behavior (drug use, truancy, antisocial behavior), because it allows for some autonomy while permitting parents to keep track of their teens. However, these studies typically measured parental knowledge of adolescents’ out-of-home activities, not monitoring. Many studies in Western countries have confirmed that parental knowledge comes primarily from adolescent disclosure of their activities, not parents’ solicitation of information or behavioral control. Among Palestinian refugee youth in Jordan, adolescent disclosure, maternal solicitation, and behavioral control all were associated with greater maternal knowledge, but as in Western societies, only child-driven processes (less disclosure, more secrecy) were associated with greater norm breaking and anxiety. This ‘monitoring debate’  has led to much research examining how adolescents manage information with their parents and the parenting and parent-adolescent relationship qualities, such as trust and supportive relationships that facilitate adolescents’ willing disclosure to parents (see also Kobak, in press, this issue). More recent research has attempted to identify situations where parental monitoring is effective (or not). For example, although used infrequently, parental snooping provides parents with additional information about teens’ activities, but violates adolescents’ expectations for privacy and is thus associated with problematic family functioning. Parents’ reactions to adolescent disclosure are important; negative reactions cause a cascade of ill effects, including teens’ negative feelings about parents and feelings of being controlled, and in turn, increased secrecy and declines in disclosure. Furthermore, although solicitation of information is seen as intrusive and controlling, it does reduce anti-social behavior over time among early adolescents who spend a lot of time unsupervised and challenge parents’ legitimate authority. 

Reactions to parental monitoring are also contextually sensitive. Negative reactions are greater when parent-adolescent relationships are lower in warmth and parental legitimacy beliefs are weaker. More generally, parental monitoring is often considered effective in keeping children out of trouble when they live in dangerous or violent neighborhoods. However, controlling for parental education and family income, recent large-scale research in nine countries found little evidence that parental monitoring moderated the links between neighborhood danger and children’s aggressive behavior.

 Recent research also has examined the effects of parental monitoring of adolescents’ use of different media. A longitudinal study found that active monitoring (parental discussion to encourage a more critical stance) was most common in early adolescence and that it, as well as restrictive monitoring (how much and over what parents limit access), declined in middle adolescence, while actively choosing to do nothing increased. Active media monitoring had positive effects on adolescents’ adjustment over time, whereas restrictive media monitoring did not. A meta-analysis showed that active monitoring protected against aggression, sexual involvement, and substance use, but not media time use; thus, it may be effective in providing developmentally appropriate autonomy. Monitoring of media use is a timely and important topic, but future research should disaggregate adolescents’ use of different types of media and focus on new, emerging forms of social media, some of which make parental monitoring increasingly challenging. What do parents want to know about adolescents’ activities?

 A mixed methods study found that U.S. mothers of middle adolescents ‘always’ wanted to know about teens’ dangerous, illegal, or risky activities, academic performance and schoolwork, and interpersonal relationships. Mothers’ desires to know about teens’ activities declined over time, with psychological control and positive and negative relationship quality predicting initial levels as well as the trajectory of beliefs. Most mothers stated that there was nothing they did not want to know but that they did not necessarily need to know everything.