The Longitudinal Consistency of Mother–Child Reporting Discrepancies of Parental Monitoring and Their Ability to Predict Child Delinquent Behaviors Two Years Later

Recently, researchers have argued that parental monitoring is primarily accounted for by the Parental Knowledge domain of the construct (Kerr and Stattin 2000; Soenens et al. 2006; Stattin and Kerr 2000). Moreover, some researchers maintain that parental knowledge is primarily child-driven (e.g., through disclosure; Kerr and Stattin 2000), whereas other researchers emphasize the direct influence of parent behaviors (Fletcher et al. 2004). Despite debate over the relative contribution of parent and child behaviors to parental knowledge, research and theory across diverse areas of the clinical and developmental sciences suggest that parent–child relationships are bi-directional; parent and child behaviors exert dynamic effects (e.g., Caspi et al. 2002; Granic and Patterson 2006; Laird et al. 2003; Stice and Barrera 1995).

Additionally, we decided to assess and examine parental monitoring across the three domains of Parental Knowledge, Parental Solicitation, and Child Disclosure. We did so because prior work suggests that mother–child reporting discrepancies across all three parental monitoring domains correlate with salient mother and child characteristics, namely their depressive symptoms (De Los Reyes et al. 2008). This observation is consistent with a long line of research and theory on informants’ mood-congruent reporting of child and family behavior as a factor that partially accounts for informant discrepancies (see De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005; De Los Reyes and Prinstein 2004; Richters 1992). Our key goal with this study was to advance understanding of informant discrepancies and more specifically the ability of these discrepancies to demonstrate both consistency over time and prediction of important behaviors. Therefore, the goals of this study are greatly supported by using both multiple measures of informant discrepancies as well as discrepancies on constructs for which prior work suggests meaningfully correlate with the characteristics of the informants reporting on the constructs. Thus, there was a strong empirical and conceptual rationale to examine reporting discrepancies across these three domains of parental monitoring, rather than any one of them individually.

As mentioned previously, prior work has identified no significant relationships between a child’s age and mother–child discrepancies in parental monitoring reports (De Los Reyes et al. 2008). At the same time, the broader literature on informant discrepancies in assessments of children and adolescents has been inconsistent as to whether such discrepancies relate to a child’s age (for a review see De Los Reyes and Kazdin 2005). To address these inconsistencies, we report results of analyses examining: (a) the relationships among the latent profiles of mother–child discrepancies in parental monitoring reports and two different indices of child age (dichotomous and continuous) and (b) whether the conclusions of our main tests (see Table 1) change as a function of which index of child age we use (dichotomous vs. continuous). For the dichotomous age variable, we took a median split of the sample in which we coded children ages 9–12 “0” (n = 181) and children ages 13–16 “1” (n = 154). Consistent with prior work on mother–child discrepancies in reports of parental monitoring (De Los Reyes et al. 2008), we found no significant relationships in chi-square tests of the distributions of dichotomous child age scores and the latent profiles of mother–child reporting discrepancies, as well as ANOVA tests of the differences among latent profiles in continuous age scores, both p’s > .09. Further, our main tests (see Table 1) yield the same conclusions, regardless of whether the dichotomous or continuous age variable is used in the tests. In fact, in both circumstances for the child age variable the Partial η ² was 0 and the F was 0. These findings speak to the lack of evidence supporting the idea that youth age relates to mother–child discrepancies in parental monitoring reports in this sample or that age has any bearing on the patterns of effects that we identified.