Cross-Cultural Examination of Links between Parent–Adolescent Communication and Adolescent Psychological Problems in 12 Cultural Groups

Based on parenting theories (Soenens et al. 2019), it was expected that parent communication efforts would be negatively related to adolescent psychological problems over time. However, results of this study showed no significant links from parent communication efforts to adolescent psychological problems. In contrast, lower levels of parent behavioral control seem to be predicted by greater adolescent internalizing problems. These null findings are somewhat surprising given that parent behavioral control is usually referred to as a parenting strategy protective of the development of children’s externalizing (Pinquart 2017a) and internalizing problems (Pinquart 2017b). One explanation for the null results may be the developmental stage of the adolescents. Early adolescence is characterized by increased individuation from parents as well as enhanced need of autonomy (Soenens et al. 2019). Such changes are often reflected in decreased levels of parental behavioral control as well as decreases in adolescents’ willingness to conform to rules (Masche 2010) and an increased likelihood of adolescents finding parents’ actions intrusive instead of caring (Hawk et al. 2008). Supporting this hypothesis, the non-significant association between parent-driven communication efforts and adolescent psychological outcomes corroborates other empirical research, which found null effects of parent-driven communication on early adolescents’ delinquency (Keijsers et al. 2010a) and substance use (Kapetanovic et al. 2019b). Another explanation for these null results may be the inclusion of adolescents’ own communication efforts in the model. Preliminary bivariate correlations across the entire sample showed that parent solicitation and behavioral control were both significantly and negatively associated with contemporaneous child externalizing behavior, and parent behavioral control was significantly negatively correlated with subsequent child externalizing behavior (as expected given prior meta-analyses e.g., Pinquart 2017a, 2017b). However, parent communication efforts were non-significant predictors of adolescent psychological problems once adolescents’ own communication efforts were included in the model. The null results align with those seen from other studies that simultaneously assessed adolescents’ own communication efforts and parent-driven communication. In these studies, parent communication efforts do not emerge as significant unique predictors of adolescent problems (see Kapetanovic et al. 2017). Notably, the present results showed that only adolescents’ own communication efforts were related to their psychosocial problems over time. Thus, adolescent-driven communication efforts, or more specifically adolescent secrecy, as opposed to parent-driven communication efforts, seem to be more important predictors of subsequent psychological problems. The current findings extend the classic Stattin and Kerr (2000) work by emphasizing that both parents’ and adolescents’ communication patterns need to be examined simultaneously to grasp associations between parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems in many cultural contexts.

In addition, most earlier studies (e.g., Kapetanovic et al. 2019a) include adolescent communication effort as a mixture of disclosure and non-secrecy. However, as suggested by scholars (Frijns et al. 2010), this study included adolescent secrecy and disclosure as distinct constructs. Corroborating results from Frijns et al. (2010), adolescent secrecy, but not disclosure, was linked to psychological problems over time. More specifically, adolescent secrecy was bidirectionally associated with higher levels of externalizing problems, meaning that higher levels of secrecy predicted externalizing problems, and higher externalizing problems predicted higher levels of secrecy. Withholding information from parents may be a normative part of the adolescent individuation process linked to more autonomy from parents (Finkenauer et al. 2002). Yet, a consequence of this secrecy may be that parents become less knowledgeable of their adolescents’ whereabouts which may result in fewer opportunities to support and guide their adolescents and more opportunities for adolescents to engage in aggressive or delinquent behavior. To clarify, externalizing problems are marked by lack of self-control and exhibition of rule breaking, aggressive, and delinquent behaviors (Merikangas et al. 2010). Adolescents exhibiting such problems are often met with criticism from peers or adults (Dishion and Patterson 1998). Because adolescents with such problems often lack skills to control their behavior, criticism from others may induce feelings of guilt and shame. As a result, adolescents may withdraw and withhold important information from others, including their parents, so that they may avoid shame and sanctions, and continue to engage in delinquent and externalizing behavior (Dishion and Patterson 1998). Attachment to parents is often considered as a prerequisite for acquiring self-control skills and for positive psychosocial development (Hirschi 1969). Keeping secrets from parents may have an adverse effect on the parent–adolescent relationship, putting a strain on the emotional bond between parents and their adolescent children. In other words, withholding information does not necessarily result in personal autonomy (in a positive sense) as proposed by Finkenauer et al. (2002) for all adolescents, but in some adolescents could lead to alienation from parents, which increases opportunities for unmonitored opportunities for delinquency, affiliation with deviant peers, and consequent externalizing behavior (Dishion and Patterson 1998). In that sense, adolescent secrecy could facilitate a vicious cycle where parents have difficulty reaching out and helping their adolescents to improve their self-control skills, and adolescents demonstrate more externalizing problems.

Moreover, corroborating the findings in other studies (Kapetanovic et al. 2019a), the present results showed that in a cross-cultural sample of adolescents, adolescent disclosure was associated with higher levels of parent behavioral control and solicitation over time. This finding indicates that adolescents’ willingness to communicate with parents may be the driving force in parent–adolescent communication. Sharing information with parents could be interpreted by parents as a sign that their adolescent is open to communicating with their parents, which facilitates opportunities for parents to ask questions and stipulate their own expectations and rules. In other words, adolescents seem to provide opportunities for parents to be engaged in their adolescents’ lives. The word of caution is that the significance levels in links from adolescent disclosure to behavioral control were only marginal (p = 0.053–0.059). However, because the findings were in line with other earlier studies, were nearly significant even after controlling for other powerful covariates, and were nearly significant across all 12 cultures studied, they are reported here.

An important question in parenting research is whether parenting effects on children’s and adolescents’ psychosocial development are universal or differ by culture. The current study addressed this question by finding that, in addition to the universal effects reported above, there are some culture-specific links among parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems. First, adolescent internalizing problems were prospectively associated with less disclosure, while adolescent secrecy was prospectively associated with greater internalizing problems in Jordan and Colombia. Furthermore, a negative link from internalizing problems to disclosure also emerged in the Chinese sample, and a negative link from externalizing problems to disclosure emerged in the Swedish and Kenyan samples of adolescents. These findings indicate that the relation between adolescent communication efforts and internalizing problems in Jordanian and Colombian adolescents was negative and intertwined such that adolescents who experienced internalizing problems disclosed less over time, while their secrecy toward parents resulted in more internalizing problems over time. In both Jordanian and Colombian culture, respect and guidance (Oweis et al. 2012) as well as loyalty and attachment between family members (Di Giunta et al. 2011) are especially strongly valued. Consequently, non-normative lack of communication between parents and adolescents in these cultures might be especially deleterious to both parent–adolescent communication and adolescent internalizing symptoms, given the central role family relationships play in both Jordan and Colombia. When adolescents share information with their parents, parents are given opportunities to provide social support, which is one of the most powerful protective factors that buffers adolescents against internalizing problems (Hamza and Willoughby 2011). By contrast, when adolescents experience internalizing problems they tend to withdraw from others, including parents (Rothenberg et al. 2018) and therefore disclose less (Hamza and Willoughby 2011), which makes it harder for parents to be involved and provide such preventative social support. In cultures such as Jordan and Kenya, this lack of social support might be especially detrimental because family relationships are so highly valued in both cultures.

It is however somewhat surprising that similar links were not found among Western adolescents given the widely demonstrated link between adolescent-driven communication efforts and psychological problems (e.g., Racz and McMahon 2011). Then again, earlier studies with Western adolescents predominantly measured adolescent disclosure as a mixture of disclosure and secrecy (Stattin and Kerr 2000) (rather than separating these two constructs as proposed by Frijns et al. 2010) and often investigated externalizing (e.g., Racz and McMahon 2011) rather than internalizing problems. One exception is a study by Hamza and Willoughby (2011) where a negative link from adolescent depressive symptoms to disclosure was found among Canadian mid-adolescents and a study by Jäggi et al. (2016) where a negative link between depressive symptoms to secrecy was found among US Black preadolescents. Thus, specific prospective links between adolescent disclosure, secrecy, and internalizing among early adolescents have rarely been studied prior to the present investigation, and less is known about these links worldwide. Perhaps such links are less common than intuitively expected. The largely non-significant link between parent–adolescent communication and internalizing problems could also be a matter of how adolescent disclosure, in particular, is conceptualized. Scholars suggest that differentiating between routine disclosure (i.e., sharing of information about one’s whereabouts, as measured here) and self-disclosure (i.e., sharing of deeper and more intimate information) is imperative when studying adolescent information management and the potential links to adolescent developmental trajectories (Tilton-Weaver et al. 2014). Although adolescent disclosure indeed is related to emotional connectedness between parents and their adolescents (Kapetanovic et al. 2019c), it is possible that measures of more specific and personal disclosure would provide more insight in the investigation of potential correlates of internalizing problems. More studies where adolescent internalizing problems and disclosure (routine or personal) and secrecy are studied are needed to gain better understanding of the processes between adolescent communication efforts and internalizing problems.

Furthermore, a negative link from internalizing problems to disclosure emerged in the Chinese sample, and a negative link from externalizing problems to disclosure emerged in the Swedish and Kenyan samples of adolescents. These findings indicate that the Chinese adolescents who were experiencing internalizing problems, and Swedish and Kenyan adolescents who were experiencing externalizing problems, disclosed less information to their parents over time. Another recent study (Lansford et al. 2018a) found that China had the second-lowest overall levels of adolescent internalizing behaviors, and both Sweden and Kenya had some of the lowest overall levels of externalizing behaviors. It is possible that when adolescents in these cultures experience psychological problems that are especially rare, they may be even more disturbed or ashamed of such problems, and therefore even less likely to discuss such problems with their parents, compared to adolescents in other cultures where such problems are more normative. Therefore, cultural norms about the experiences of such problems (i.e., that they rarely occur) may make the link between experiencing behavior problems and avoiding disclosure even stronger. Additionally, in China, Colombia, Thailand and U.S. Black samples, externalizing problems predicted lower levels of parent behavior control over time. In all of these cultures, harmony with one’s family and society is especially highly prized (Lansford et al. 2018a). Therefore, it may be that in each of these cultures, as adolescents experience more externalizing problems, parents provide adolescents with less control and more autonomy to preserve family harmony and avoid conflict over the externalizing behavior.

Finally, some parent effects on parent–adolescent communication emerged in the Colombian, U.S. Black, and U.S. Latino samples. Specifically, a positive link from parent solicitation to adolescent disclosure was discovered in the samples of Black and Latino adolescents, which corroborates findings in other studies using U.S. Black (Bumpus and Rodgers 2009) and U.S. Latino samples (Fernandez et al. 2018) where within-time correlations between parental solicitation and adolescent disclosure were found. In both U.S. Black (McLoyd et al. 2019) and Latino (Halgunseth 2019) cultures, the values of family cohesion and respect are heavily emphasized. For example, in Latino cultures, the concept of “familismo” represents the strong loyalty and attachment between different family members, including respectful and considerate behavior toward authorities, such as parents. It is therefore possible that parent solicitation and adolescent disclosure are especially likely to be linked in U.S. Black and Latino cultures due to the high emphasis on family relationships. Another parent effect was discovered in Colombian and U.S. Black samples where a negative link between parent behavioral control and adolescent disclosure emerged. Parent behavioral control was expected to be linked to higher disclosure because the structure that parents offer through their behavioral expectations is relevant for adolescents’ need for competence and, in turn, parent–adolescent communication (Soenens et al. 2019). Whether parents impose high, moderate, or low levels of behavioral expectations is highly important for adolescent adjustment (Harris-McKoy 2016). Prior work examining parent behavioral control in data used in the current study confirmed that parents in both the U.S. Black and Colombian samples demonstrate significantly higher behavioral control than the sample as a whole (Rothenberg et al. 2019). Given that parent behavioral control has been linked to increased feelings of being overly controlled (Kapetanovic et al. 2017), the high levels of parent behavioral control experienced by adolescents in these cultures may make it especially likely that adolescents feel overcontrolled, and therefore unlikely to disclose. Future studies should also include adolescent interpretations of parents’ behavioral control in studies linking parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems.

Given the lack of studies including adolescents from non-western societies, the current study takes an important step towards understanding processes in parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems across cultures. However, one limitation of the study is that the adolescents are representative of the locales, but not wider countries, from which they were drawn, so national differences cannot be inferred from the current work. Future work could therefore build on this investigation in nationally representative samples. An additional limitation is that the data only consisted of adolescents’ self-reports. Thus, associations in this study could be inflated due to response bias or common method variance. Studies indicate that parents and adolescents have different views of their interactions (de Los Reyes 2011) which is why future studies should also include parents’ perceptions of parent–adolescent communication. Additionally, though the current sample is relatively large (n = 1087), culture-specific sample sizes are rather small (with ns around 100 in each culture). Therefore, it is possible that the study was underpowered to detect all culture-specific study effects. Consequently, replication and expansion of these findings in larger culture-specific samples is warranted. Also, although cross-lagged models are informative of multiple developmental processes (Meeus 2016), two-wave models do not explicate whether the links between the constructs are stable or changing over time. A three-wave longitudinal design would more thoroughly capture changing processes in the transactional linkages and disentangle whether the relations between constructs stabilize or change over time (Ployhart and Vandenberg 2010). Thus, future studies should include several timepoints to understand the change in long-term developmental processes between parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological health. In addition, because parent–adolescent interactions are not stable, but may fluctuate from day to day, another recommendation is to study links between parent–adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems on a shorter time scale, such as on a weekly or daily basis (Villalobos Solís et al. 2015). Combining these methodologies would lend insight into short-term as well as long-term processes in parent–adolescent communication and development of adolescent psychological problems.