Who Influences Whom? Daily Parent-Adolescent Dynamics are Family Specific

Who influences whom in the parent-adolescent relationship? We propose that the answer to this longstanding question is specific to the family. To test whether the direction of effects indeed varies across families, we applied an idiographic (family-specific) approach. Dutch adolescents (N=159, Mage=13.31, 62% female) reported on perceived parenting and their affective well-being for 100 consecutive days. Pre-registered analysis revealed that some families showed a reciprocal day-to-day effect between parenting and adolescent affective well-being (11.4%-54.7%), whereas others showed a parent-driven effect (8.2%-43.4%), an adolescent-driven effect (10.1%-27.0%), or no effects at all (15.7%-60.1%). Also within a family, direction of effects varied across parenting dimensions. Adolescents with higher trait levels of environmental sensitivity and neuroticism seemed more strongly influenced by parenting. Thus, our study suggests that daily parent-adolescent dynamics are family specific. This stresses the need to move towards an idiographic parenting science to truly understand the dynamics within unique families.