One of a kind? Unraveling the complexities of parenting adolescents across time(scales) and families

In this dissertation, Savannah Boele aimed to unravel how adolescents’ functioning is influenced by parenting and vice versa. Specifically, she examined how such parenting processes in adolescence unfold within families on various timescales and differ across families. Her findings indicate that, on average, key dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth, autonomy support, and behavioral and psychological control) are linked to adolescents’ functioning within a family on various timescales. Intriguingly, when moving beyond ‘the average family’ and zooming into individual families, substantial heterogeneity in families’ parenting processes was revealed. The ways in which parenting dimensions (or practices) seemed to influence adolescents’ functioning, and vice versa, varied from family to family. Overall, the findings align with long-held theoretical beliefs that parenting processes are idiosyncratic. Therefore, the findings of this dissertation call for a paradigm shift in parenting research – one that prioritizes the individual family instead of ‘the average family’
– to truly understand how parenting processes operate within real existing families.