Kindergarten antecedents of the developmental course of active and passive parental monitoring strategies during middle childhood and adolescence

Parental Knowledge/Monitoring and Depressive Symptoms During Adolescence: Protective Factor or Spurious Association?

Parental knowledge/monitoring is negatively associated with adolescents' depressive symptoms, suggesting monitoring could be a target for prevention and treatment. However, no study has rigorously addressed the possibility that this association is spurious, leaving the clinical and etiological implications unclear. The goal of this study was to conduct a more rigorous test of whether knowledge/monitoring is causally related to depressive symptoms. 7940 youth (ages 10.5-15.6 years, 49% female) at 21 sites across the U.S. completed measures of parental knowledge/monitoring and their own depressive symptoms at four waves 11-22 weeks apart during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, monitoring and depression were examined in standard, between-family regression models. Second, within-family changes in monitoring and depression between assessments were examined in first differenced regressions. Because the latter models control for stable, between-family differences, they comprise a stronger test of a causal relation. In standard, between-family models, parental monitoring and youths' depressive symptoms were negatively associated (standardized [Formula: see text]= -0.22, 95% CI = [-0.25, -0.20], p < 0.001). In first-differenced, within-family models, the association shrunk by about 55% (standardized [Formula: see text]= -0.10, 95% CI = [-0.12, -0.08], p < 0.001). The magnitude of within-family association remained similar when adjusting for potential time-varying confounders and did not vary significantly by youth sex, age, or history of depressive disorder. Thus, in this community-based sample, much of the prima facie association between parental knowledge/monitoring and youths' depressive symptoms was driven by confounding variables rather than a causal process. Given the evidence to date, a clinical focus on increasing parental knowledge/monitoring should not be expected to produce meaningfully large improvements in youths' depression.

Maternal Parenting Behaviors Amplify Environmental Influences on Developmental Trajectories of Alcohol Use During Adolescence

Compared to peer alcohol use, less is known on how parenting practices may modify genetic and environmental contributions to alcohol use longitudinally across adolescence. This study examined whether two maternal parenting behaviors, supervision and harsh parenting, may suppress or amplify genetic and environmental influences on three distinct developmental trajectories of adolescent alcohol use: normative increasing, early-onset, and low trajectories. Participants were drawn from a longitudinal study of a population-based twin sample (N = 842, 84% European descent, 52.7% female). Adolescents self-reported their past year alcohol use at ages 13, 14, 15, and 17 years, and their mothers reported their supervision and harsh parenting when twins were 13, 15, and 17 years old. Maternal supervision amplified non-shared environmental influence on the normative increasing and early-onset trajectories, whereas maternal harsh parenting amplified shared environmental influence on the early-onset trajectory and non-shared environmental influence on the low trajectory, respectively. The findings suggest maternal parenting practices as a potent developmental context that modulates the environmental influences of other proximal processes on adolescent alcohol use, and suggest that family-based parenting-focused intervention could be especially beneficial for adolescents following the early-onset trajectory.