This study examined Turkish mothers' domain-specific judgements and justifications of maternal restrictions on children's self-defining activities and their links to mother-reported children's social understanding (CSU). Mothers (N = 243) of preschool-aged children (M age = 62.60 months, SD = 10.46) completed an online survey including the Children's Social Understanding Scale and vignettes adapted from Lagattuta et al. (2010) depicting maternal restrictions in the personal domain (painting), mixed personal/conventional domains (girl's soccer, boy's ballet), and moral domain (bullying). Mothers judged restrictions as more acceptable in bullying than in nonharmful personal and mixed-domain vignettes, and children's insistence as more acceptable in painting, soccer, and ballet than in bullying. Justifications were domain-differentiated: bullying elicited mainly moral reasoning, whereas nonharmful activities elicited primarily personal/autonomy reasoning. Mothers were more accepting of restricting the boy's ballet than the girls' soccer but did not differ in judgements of insistence. In regression analyses, child age, moral domain-aligned reasoning, and acceptance of the girl's insistence on soccer uniquely predicted mother-reported CSU. Findings highlight links among autonomy, harm, gendered expectations, and maternal perceptions of children's social understanding.
Adolescence is a critical developmental period in which personality undergoes substantial transformation, creating both vulnerability to psychopathology and opportunities for adaptive development. Over the past two decades, interest in the developmental aspects of early personality pathology has grown, driven by research demonstrating that these disorders emerge during adolescence. The introduction of the Alternative Model for Personality Disorder (AMPD) in DSM-5 Section III, along with the shift to a dimensional model in ICD-11, marks a new era in which the fully dimensional approach enables for the evaluation of personality functioning across the entire spectrum, from adaptive to maladaptive, allowing for assessment across developmental stages and disorder progression. This paper reviews the emerging research on personality dysfunction in adolescence, evaluating its developmental and clinical relevance, summarizing key advances, and identifying current limitations and priorities for future research. Drawing on a developmental psychopathology perspective, the paper further proposes extending the study of personality functioning beyond vulnerability and impairment to include positive developmental outcomes, such as resilience, well-being, and positive mental health. Integrating risk and adaptive functioning may advance understanding of adolescent personality development and inform more comprehensive approaches to prevention and early intervention.
Theories describe parenting processes in adolescence as reciprocal, timing-sensitive, and heterogeneous; however, these meta-theoretical principles are often not carried through into research designs. Despite earlier calls to bridge such theory - method gaps, they continue to pervade contemporary studies. Building on these earlier efforts, I explain why several gaps persist and highlight recent studies that align more closely with these theoretical principles. Their findings show that within-family associations between parenting and adolescent functioning are not solely parent-driven, unfold differently across timescales, and vary meaningfully across families. I end with methodological recommendations to further bridge these gaps, including modelling time-lagged effects, using micro-randomized trials, treating effects as timescale-sensitive, systematically examining heterogeneity, identifying generalizable patterns via bottom-up approaches, and adopting dynamic systems approaches. A closer match between theory and methods will ultimately yield more valid conclusions and evidence-based interventions.
