When Parental Support Backfires on Adolescents

Introduction

One-third of adolescents (12-18) experience emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression. This leads to enormous personal impact which often continues a lifetime. Support from parents is a protective factor that can increase the well-being of adolescents and reduce depression and anxiety. However, defying this currently held view, concerns are growing that support backfires in some families.

The Parental Support Paradox

No matter how well-intended and well-received in the short run, over-supportive parenting can undermine opportunities for personal growth. This weakens long-term well-being. Who support backfires for and what the mechanisms are is unknown, because psychologists have lacked the data and analytical tools to study how parenting predicts well-being in individual family units.

Developing Family-Specific Methods

To theorize the short-term and long-term effects of parenting, my team and I will conduct one of the largest and most intensive studies of parental support and well-being.

1. 300 Dutch families with a child aged 12 to 16 will complete smartphone-based micro-surveys to capture parent-child interactions in daily life.
2. Families are followed for three years, with seven follow-up surveys.
3. As ultimate proof of theorized family-specific dynamics, we will test in an experiment (2 x n=100) if feedback on their real-life data strengthens parenting and improves child well-being.

Impact

Now that we can study each family’s unique daily dynamics, PARADOx will generate an entirely new family-specific theoretical model of parental support, explaining for whom and through which mechanisms support backfires.

We will also target these dynamics with prevention, to transform support from a potential cause of emotional problems to a protective factor. The project will develop new concepts for personalized parenting advice for this purpose. Moreover, we will deliver a toolbox of methods to study family-specific dynamics, which is disseminated across different platforms.