ABSTRACT
Engaging in adaptive parenting behaviors can improve child and adolescent well-being across a wide range of ethnic groups. Yet, comparatively little is known about whether or how parenting behaviors change over the course of childhood and adolescence and how such changes differ between ethnic groups. To explore this question, we examined trajectories of four parenting domains (warmth, behavioral control, rules/limit-setting, and knowledge solicitation) in three different ethnic groups residing in Durham, North Carolina, in the United States. Specifically, utilizing a multilevel modeling analytic framework, we examined parent trajectories as reported by children, mothers, and fathers in African American (n = 102), Latin American (n = 98), and European American (n = 110) families followed for eight consecutive years in a sample ranging from ages 8 to 19 across all waves. Parents decrease the frequency with which they exhibit all parenting behaviors to some extent in mid-to-late adolescence. Parent use of some behaviors, such as warmth and knowledge solicitation, appears to remain consistently higher and more stable across ethnic groups. Other parenting behaviors, such as parent use of rules and limit-setting, vary more widely between ethnic groups. Some parenting behaviors (especially behavioral control) vary more widely across a variety of other sociodemographic factors (i.e., levels of parent education, parent age at the time of the child’s birth, and child gender). Collectively, these results point to the importance of longitudinally evaluating parenting domains by highlighting differences in some domains (e.g., parent behavioral control and rules/limit-setting) and similarity in other domains (e.g., parent warmth and knowledge solicitation) between and within ethnic groups.
