During adolescence, parents and parental support remain to be of key importance for adolescents’ emotional well-being (e.g., Furman and Buhrmester
1992) and many studies have shown that a lack of parental support is related to internalizing problems (e.g., Pinquart
2017). However, to date, most research used classical retrospective self-report measures, longitudinal designs, and focused on relative differences between persons, while parenting and adolescents’ experiences of affective states, such as negative mood, are both dynamic and can co-fluctuate and influence each other (Heller and Casey
2016; Pardini
2008) in shorter time intervals such as days. It has been suggested that, in general, a lack of parental support is related to more negative mood in daily life (Bai et al.
2016; Reynolds et al.
2016), but individual differences have not yet been examined let alone explained. Investigating the social processes at a more day to day micro-level could provide more insight into the building blocks of longer term mental health development. The current study therefore examined the daily within-person associations between perceived parental support and adolescent negative mood. Furthermore, it was tested whether adolescents differed in the association and if four characteristics (i.e., gender, adolescent depressive symptoms, perceived parental intrusiveness, and social support) could explain these individual differences.
The results showed that, on average, adolescents reported more negative mood on days when they perceived their parents to be less supportive. This asscociation differed significantly between adolescents which could be partially explained by the degree of adolescent depressive symptoms and perceived parental intrusiveness. The negative association between daily parental support and daily negative mood was stronger for adolescents who reported more depressive symptoms and for adolescents who perceived their parents as less intrusive. These findings suggest that in daily life, adolescents’ negative mood may be reduced by the provision of parental support, especially when adolescents experience depressive symptoms and when parents manage to respect the privacy needs of their child. Importantly, this study also provided the first insights into heterogeneity within sub-groups, which indicates that a group-differential approach to testing for explanations of heterogeneity does not suffice in understanding each adolescent’s daily life.
Adolescent Negative Mood and Parental Support
Results of previous empirical studies and reviews showed that higher levels of parental support relate to less internalizing problems (e.g., Pinquart
2017), but these are often based on the analyses of relative differences between adolescents (the between-person level) and macro time intervals. Recently, is has increasingly been questioned whether these relative differences between families can be used for obtaining insights into what is going on within a specific family and at a more micro-level such as days (Hamaker
2012; Keijsers and Van Roekel
2018). The current study therefore aimed to understand the micro-social processes as they occur within a person in daily life. The finding that day to day fluctuations in parental support were negatively associated with fluctuations in adolescent negative mood is in line with previous findings at the between-person level and with the few studies that already examined the link between parental support and emotional well-being at the within-person level (Bai et al.
2016; Reynolds et al.
2016). These results suggest homology over ecological levels and time scales, in that previous findings on the between-person longer-term link between parental support and negative mood or internalizing problems do generalize to daily life within the average person.
Individual Differences
Theoretically, the idea that every adolescent develops differently due to the person-specific interaction of personal and contextual influences is already widely acknowledged (Bronfenbrenner and Morris
2006; Sameroff
2010). Despite a wealth on studies on between-person interactions, relatively few studies have actually tested this conceptual idea that there may be also heterogeneity in the underlying processes that link parenting to fluctuations in adolescents’ affective well-being, let alone tried to explain these differences (e.g., Boele et al.
2019). Embracing the development and usage of methods in data collection (i.e., EMA) and new data analysis techniques (i.e., multilevel regression and random-intercept cross-lagged panel models) (Van Roekel et al.
2019), this study was able to detect that the association between fluctuations in daily parental support and fluctuations in daily negative mood differed between adolescents. This confirmed the hypothesis and hints that the broader theoretical idea of differential susceptibility (e.g., Pluess and Belsky
2010) or ecological models of development (e.g., Sameroff
2010) also apply to micro-social processes in daily life (Granic et al.
2003). For some adolescents, negative mood may be the result of a lack of support, while for others daily parental support may not have an impact on their daily negative mood. Although more studies are necessary to better understand this heterogeneity, it does highlight that it is a fallacy to assume that ‘one size fits all’ (Keijsers and Van Roekel
2018), when it comes to such person-environment interactions. The use of (new) methods and techniques which allow to collect intensive longitudinal data (e.g., Molenaar
2004) may enable us to gain more insight in the daily life processes and ultimately help clinical practice to better tailor prevention to the unique needs of a family, since adolescent daily negative mood can relate to internalizing problems (Maciejewski et al.
2014). The association between daily negative mood and adolescent depressive symptoms in the current study confirms this idea of negative mood being a precursor or even indicator of depressive symptoms.
Explaining Differences between Adolescents
Driven by a need to better understand who may benefit, in the short term, most (or least) from parental support, four theoretically plausible characteristics that may explain the observed differences between adolescents were also tested. Gender, although previously found to be related to adolescent negative affect (Zahn-Waxler
2000), did not explain the differences between adolescents in the association between daily parental support and daily negative mood in this study. The current finding partly contradicts results of a previous study in which gender did moderate the association between family support and adolescent negative affect (Weinstein et al.
2006). However, this study examined gender in relation to the between-person association between family support and negative affect while the current study examined the within-person association between parental support and adolescent negative mood. Moreover, the previous study assessed family support on three time points, once per wave (Weinstein et al.
2006), instead of daily as in the current study. The findings thus suggest that, when focusing on micro-social processes in daily life, adolescent negative mood of boys and girls is not affected differently by parental support. More research is necessary to validate this finding.
Social support of others did also not explain the heterogeneity in contrast to the expectations. The finding of this study seems to underline the idea that parents remain a key source of emotional well-being for adolescents (Furman and Buhrmester
1992), independent of other sources. Although no sources of support were specified in the social support measure used in the current study and therefore could also include parents, friends may be another source for support since friendships become more important during adolescence (e.g., De Goede et al.
2009). A previous finding indicated that the association between family support and adolescent negative affect was stronger than the association between peer support and adolescent negative affect (Weinstein et al.
2006). Furthermore, the sample in the current study had a mean age of 14 years old and it is possible that social support of others would have had more impact if older adolescents were included. Developmental theories suggest that peers start having a stronger influence on adolescents from early to mid-adolescence and for instance peer support may become more protective with regard to adolescent depressive symptoms from mid adolescence onwards (Young et al.
2005).
Both adolescent depressive symptoms and perceived parental intrusiveness, however, did explain partly why the association between daily parental support and daily negative mood differed between adolescents, as expected. For adolescents who reported more depressive symptoms, daily parental support was more strongly related to daily negative mood than for adolescents who reported less depressive symptoms. This suggests that daily parental support is more beneficial for adolescents with depressive symptoms, but it may also indicate that the lack of parental support that day leaves especially adolescents who report depressive symptoms blue. However, as this study is correlational in nature, the reverse effect may also explain these results in that adolescents with higher levels of depressive feelings are more likely to have their own negative mood color the perception of parents as being less supportive. After having established a first indication of this within-person association between perceived parental support and adolescent negative mood, future research should assess the direction of effects, since many theories argue that parenting processes include bidirectional effects between parents and children (e.g., Bronfenbrenner and Morris
2006), for instance by examining lagged within-person effects between parental support and negative mood in daily life. Additionally, conducting a similar study in a clinical sample of adolescents could further strengthen the interpretation. Despite the additional research needed, the current findings do suggest that parenting advice which is directed at the provision of parental support should be tailored to the unique characteristics of the adolescent (i.e., adolescent’s level of depressive symptoms), as well as the processes within the specific family.
Above and beyond adolescents’ depressive symptoms, parental perceived intrusiveness also explained differences between adolescents in the association between daily parental support and daily negative mood, as expected. Compared to adolescents who reported more parental intrusiveness, for adolescents with generally non-intrusive parents, daily parental support was more strongly related to daily negative mood, suggesting that these adolescents feel better at days with more parental support. For adolescents with perceptions of privacy invasive parenting, no association between daily parental support and daily negative mood was found. Parental intrusive behaviors, such as snooping or prying into a child business, may interfere with adolescents’ normative developmental needs to establish a more autonomous position from their parents, establish privacy boundaries, and become emotionally more independent (e.g., Hawk et al.
2008). The provision of support by parents might only be effective and contribute to adolescent well-being, when parents provide support in an autonomy supportive manner (e.g., Van der Giessen et al.
2014). In fact, a recent study suggested that privacy invasion may reduce the quality of the parent-child communication, and that children undertake active measures to keep an intrusive parent more distant (Dietvorst et al.
2017). Moreover, it aligns with theoretical ideas regarding overinvolved parenting showing negative, rather than positive outcomes for the child in the longer run (e.g., McLeod et al.
2007).
However, despite the fact that adolescent depressive symptoms as well as perceived intrusiveness may explain heterogeneity, this group-differential explanation was far from conclusive. Even within a group of adolescents reporting clinically depressive symptoms, there still were differences between adolescents, with some reporting more negative mood on days when their parents were perceived supportive and others reporting less negative mood. These differences emphasize the importance of acknowledging heterogeneity even more and support the recent call to start using a more person-specific, idiographic approach in research instead of the more established nomothetic approach (Molenaar
2004), or group-differential approach when it comes to the study of parenting and adolescent well-being (Keijsers et al.
2016). With a multilevel method, this study sets one step in the direction of describing the factors that contribute to uniqueness of these processes, as well as visualizing the remaining uniqueness of each person within subgroups.
For a translation into clinical practice the current approach may open up some first insights into how to tailor interventions, but it may not suffice. Ultimately, to truly understand, each individual family may need to be studied as a unit by itself, for instance to personalize interventions to the family-specific dynamics. In the clinical practice, this more person-centered approach is already more often used (e.g., Wichers et al.
2011), leading to a burst of studies and clinical novel applications in clinical practice (e.g. Van Roekel et al.
2017). However, there is a strikingly sparsity in studies on family-specific dynamics through which parenting affects adolescent well-being (Boele et al.
2019).
Limitations
Some limitations need to be taken into account. The sample of the study was rather homogeneous in terms of background characteristics because only adolescents of one preparatory secondary school in the south of the Netherlands participated, although the percentage of depressive symptoms in the sample aligned with prevalence percentages in the Netherlands (Statistics Netherlands
2019). It is unknown whether the current findings generalize to more ethnically diverse samples and this should be addressed in future studies. Furthermore, the study focused on short term associations and was correlational in nature, so the direction of the association or long-term effects remain unclear. Moreover, the current study focused solely on adolescent reports and perceptual biases might have affected the findings. Adolescents who show more depressive symptoms might have a more negative way of looking at their environment, also known as a negativity bias (i.e., Platt et al.
2016). This can affect their way of reporting and explain stable between-person differences in perceived privacy invasion for instance. Also, viewpoints of adolescents and parents on parenting behavior can differ. A multi-method approach such as including parental reports or observations would enable us to examine this possible perceptual bias. In addition, a suggestion for future research would be to also assess possible discrepancies in reports of parents and adolescents on for instance parental support. It has been suggested that discrepancies on for instance parent-child negative interactions influence depressive symptoms in adolescents (Nelemans et al.
2016). With regard to the measures, the measure of general social support did not differentiate between sources of social support and could also involve parental support. This could imply a possible overlap with the daily parental support measure. However, the content of the measures and the use of different time scales (daily or once) and the low correlation seem to indicate minimal overlap. Furthermore, the current study used a novel daily parental support measure that used only one item to reduce burden on the participants. To assess validity, a CFA was performed and results showed significant positive correlations with the subscale support of the NRI. Future research, using more extended scales for daily assessments would provide opportunities to examine the psychometric properties more in-depth. Lastly, parental support in general was examined instead of differentiating between maternal and parental support. According to the family system theory (Cox and Paley
1997), the mother-adolescent relationship and father-adolescent relationship can be seen as separate subsystems within a family (Restifo and Bögels
2009). Fathers and mothers might affect their adolescents differently, which could be assessed in future studies, to obtain a better understanding of the unique patterns and processes in each family.