UC Riverside

Parental psychological control (PPC) is characterized by parental manipulative, inhibiting, and/or invalidating tactics to control youth’s socioemotional development, which are linked to negative youth adjustment outcomes. However, PPC effects on youth’s adjustment may vary across domains, and, consistent with transactional models of development, youth’s adjustment may reciprocally influence PPC expression. This investigation evaluated unidirectional and transactional relations between PPC and youth’s internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and parent-youth attachment security from late childhood (i.e., age 10) to early adolescence (i.e., age 12) as expressed in diverse groups based on youth’s sex assigned at birth, ethnicity-race, and neighborhood risk. Parent-youth dyads (N = 214; 49.5% female; 45.8% Latine; 36.5% in poverty) were drawn from a longitudinal study of child development. PPC was observationally rated by trained coders, youth’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms were reported by examiners, parent-youth attachment security was indicated by youth’s reports, and neighborhood risk was composited across multiple Census and FBI indicators. After controlling for family socioeconomic status, bivariate latent difference score models showed within-person variability in PPC and youth’s adjustment from ages 10 to 12, with PPC demonstrating growth, whereas youth’s externalizing problems and parent-youth attachment security, but not youth’s internalizing problems, declined. Transactional analyses supported a parent effect model wherein PPC predicted less change (i.e., more stability) in youth’s internalizing problems, and a youth effect model wherein youth-reported attachment security predicted increased PPC. Although changes in PPC were not related to changes in youth’s adjustment, there was a significant association between changes in youth’s externalizing problems and changes in PPC for families residing in higher-risk neighborhoods. In higher-risk neighborhoods, youth’s externalizing problems predicted less growth in observed PPC, but this relation was not significant for families in lower-risk neighborhoods. This study revealed directionally and contextually nuanced relations between PPC and youth’s multi-domain adjustment. The obtained pathways speak to the reciprocity of parent and youth effects such that PPC is not unilaterally deleterious for youth’s development, and youth’s adjustment may differentially influence PPC as a function of broader contextual risks. Therefore, applied efforts to enhance the parent-youth relationship in early adolescence must entail careful consideration of both transactional and contextual dynamics to promote positive parenting and youth’s adjustment.