CAS 340 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Emerging Adulthood And Early Adulthood, Peer Group, Condom
26 Jun 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Parenting in Adolescence
Characteristics
• Just like everything else, nature of parent-child relationship will change.
• Based on maturing psychological independence, search for identity & desire to gain peer
group acceptance
• Parent-adolescent conflict increases. It’s normal, although excessive amounts predict
poor adolescent outcomes
• Poor parent-adolescent communication often a key source of conflict
❖ Emerging adulthood
❖ Not perfect agreement of when it starts or end (adolescence)
❖ -physical independence (driving, sports, jobs part-time,
❖ relationships increase peer interaction ,
❖ -more able to do more
❖ Psychological independence (drive psychical independence)
o continue identity diversity between parent & child
o interest adolescent conflict (second conflict / first in 2 & 3 year old conflict)
o adolescence want to act a certain way parents don’t allow, adolescence wants
more independent makes wants to control dependence.
o Parents believe their interest is the healthies one
How to Mitigate Conflict
• Maintain open channels of communication
o Also improves success of parental monitoring (Stattin & Kerr, 2000)
• Show genuine interest in adolescent’s activities & life
o Peers, School, Sports, Opinions
• Show tolerance for differences in some domains, e.g. pick your battles
o Dress, musical interests,
• Don’t take all adolescent comments too seriously
o E.g., “I hate you”
❖ Best monitoring the adolescence willing to tell you what is happening in there life
o How to create this :
o Sharing is base on a history/ commination of situation of how parents interacted.
Such as child sharing a bad experience and parents react was not supportive or
worse than child do not feel comfortable sharing
o Asking more in detail instead how was school instead using more of how did English
class go
o Remember things they are doing
o Natural peer influencce
o not associate with outcomes (music, clothing, hair style)
o Adolescents know you well they know what to say to you
Emerging Adolescent Sexuality
• Often parent’s biggest worry, especially for adolescent daughters
• 2 trends to remember
o Age of Onset of sexual activities has been dropping historically (although % of
adolescents not engaging in intercourse has remained stable or gone up over last 2
generations)
o But teenage pregnancy rates have also gone down…A LOT
❖ Puberty – moving target
❖ Teen pregnancy dropping
Parenting Issues
• Some mixed data on parenting effects on age of onset of sexual intercourse
o Generally, the more the discussion between parents-adolescents, the longer the
period of abstinence & the greater the use of contraceptives
• While parents seem to agree that adolescents need to be educated on sexual issues, not
everyone wants to do it themselves
❖ High numbers but parents rarely want to do it
• 2009 UCLA/Rand Study of 141 families enrolled in Talking Parents, Healthy Teens
Program
o Study included questions about 24 issues regarding sex and sexuality, including
how women become pregnant, body changes that occur during puberty, how to
use condoms and birth control.
o Study found that 40% of adolescents had already had sex before having a
discussion of safe sex and std’s with parents.
o Also interesting, while 70% of the boys in the study did not remember talking
about safe sex with parents, only 50% of parents said they hadn’t
❖ Talking parents gave was so general and vague that the son did not tell it was sex talk
