Parent-Adolescent Relations

Steven A. Branstetter & Lesley Cottrell

Parents and their children relate, or interact, on a number of different levels: as playmates, as teacher and student, as healer and patient, as disciplinarian and offender. Interactions between parents and their children that are characterized by warmth, consistency, reciprocity, supportiveness, and openness have consistently been shown to be related to a range of positive outcomes. For example, children who report having a positive relationship with their parents tend to have higher self-esteem, have more positive peer relationships, do better in school, and avoid behaviors such as substance use and delinquency. In fact, the relationship between a parent and his or her child may be one of the most crucial factors in the personality growth of the child, and the quality of that relationship may determine how susceptible the child is to deviations in normal development. Moreover, despite the popular notion that parents become increasingly irrelevant during adolescence, there is ...

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