Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Dating Relationship Abuse: Attitudes and Experiences

Parenting behaviors such as monitoring and communications are known correlates of abusive outcomes in adolescent dating relationships. This longitudinal study draws on separate parent (58 % female; 61 % White non-Hispanic, 12 % Black non-Hispanic, 7 % other non-Hispanic, and 20 % Hispanic) and youth (ages 12–18 years; 48 % female) surveys from the nationally representative Survey of Teen Relationships and Intimate Violence. Latent class analyses were applied to investigate whether there are distinguishable parenting profiles based on six measures of parent–youth relationship and interactions, with youth’s attitudes about abusive dating behavior and both perpetration and victimization examined in a follow-up survey as distal outcomes (n = 1117 parent–youth dyads). A three-class model—a “Positive Parenting” class, a “Strict/Harsh Parenting” class, and a “Disengaged/Harsh Parenting” class—was selected to best represent the data. The selected latent class model was conditioned on parents’ (anger trait, relationship quality, attitudes about domestic violence) and youth’s (prior victimization and perpetration) covariates, controlling for parent’s gender, race/ethnicity, income, marital status, and youth’s age and gender. Youth in the “Positive Parenting” class were significantly less likely 1 year later to be tolerant of violence against boyfriends under any conditions as well as less likely to perpetrate adolescent relationship abuse or to be a victim of adolescent relationship abuse. Parents’ anger and relationship quality and youth’s prior perpetration of adolescent relationship abuse as well as gender, age, and race/ethnicity predicted class membership, informing universal prevention program and message design, as well as indicated efforts to target communications and services for parents as well as for youth.