Does Strength-Based Parenting Change Over Time for Pre-teens & Teens?

“A healthy family is necessary for a healthy society.” (Shapiro, 2004)

The teen and pre-teen years are characterized by intense changes to a young person’s physical development, identity, social life, family relationships, exposure to drugs and alcohol, academic requirements, employment, and economic responsibilities. 

This means that the second decade of life sees a young person needing to build up the psychological, emotional, and social capacities necessary to meet the demands of these changes and grow into adulthood. Adolescence has been recognized as a particularly important developmental period for the shift to more independence.

Adolescence is a “critical phase in life for achieving human potential” as it is the life stage “in which an individual establishes the social, cultural, emotional, educational, and economic resources to maintain their health and wellbeing across the life course.” (Patton)

Parents are critical in shaping an adolescent’s wellbeing but parenting research has been criticized for not adequately studying how parent-child dynamics change over time. The study that I will talk about in this article focuses on mental health outcomes for adolescents and explores the dynamic effect of strength-based parenting (SBP) on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in pre-teens and teens across a 3-wave longitudinal study examined over 14 months. This study was conducted by myself and my colleagues Daniel Loton, Dawson Grace, Rowan Jacques-Hamilton and Michael J. Zyphur and is published in Frontiers in Psychology. The article in its entirety and references can be accessed here.

Youth Wellbeing

Research shows that the greatest risk for developing mental illness occurs in the second decade of life. For example, researchers have found increases in panic disorder, agoraphobia, substance use disorders and depression from childhood to adolescence. Epidemiological research revealed a rise from 1% depression in the population under age 12 to 17-25% of the population by the end of adolescence. The World Health Organization lists depression as the number one cause of illness in adolescence. Tragically, suicide is a leading cause of death among teenagers worldwide.

Strengths and Youth Wellbeing

It is evident that efforts are needed to assist teenagers to build up their wellbeing. One factor that has been shown to be significantly, positively related to wellbeing in young people is that of strengths. 

Strengths are our capacities for excellence, our talents, and our positive personality traits.

Strengths provide a young person with a sense of energy and efficacy and are used to support positive growth. Youth studies have shown that strengths programs increase subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction. Thus, strengths offer a promising route to mental health for teenagers. 

Research shows that one powerful way to build strengths in a young person is through the strengths feedback they receive from others in their everyday life. For example, a study conducted by Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues at the University of Michigan found that when teenagers receive strengths feedback from teachers, coaches, bosses, friends, and family it boosts their wellbeing. Importantly, this research showed that strengths feedback from both professional (teachers, coaches, bosses) and personal sources (family and friends) was more important than strengths feedback from professional sources alone, suggesting that parents play an important role in teens learning about their strengths. The finding that other people can be even more accurate than the self at predicting certain trait-relevant behaviors and abilities suggests that others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. 

In particular, few experiences in life rival the extensive insight gained about another human being than that of a parent raising their child. Because parents have a myriad of daily opportunities to notice which situations and activities their child enjoys, is energized by and performs well in, they are uniquely placed to provide feedback to their teenager about his or her strengths.

Parenting and Youth Wellbeing: Strength-Based Parenting

Parenting has been a topic of empirical psychological inquiry since the 1960’s and over the past 50+ years researchers have examined a range of ways in which parenting affects a child’s mental health, adjustment, brain development, and trajectory into adulthood. The advent of positive psychology, through its umbrella effect of gathering together positively oriented science into an aligned movement, has provided the impetus and platform for researchers to study factors that create thriving families. At this stage in time, strength-based parenting has the highest number of peer-reviewed empirical publications of the positive psychology parenting topics and is the focus of this study.

Strength-based parenting is an approach to parenting that “deliberately identifies and cultivates positive states, positive processes and positive qualities in children”. 

My research program on strength-based parenting has identified two overarching findings: (1) strength-based parenting is a protective factor that is inversely related to anxiety, depression, stress, and negative emotions; and (2) strength-based parenting is an enhancing factor that is positively related to life satisfaction, self-confidence, subjective wellbeing, positive emotions, and academic grades. You can read the published scientific studies of mine on my website: www.leawaters.com.

Parental Stability Over Time

Given the significant influence a parent has on their child's wellbeing, the question of the degree to which a parent displays consistent parenting over time is an important one.

When it comes to the pre-teen and early-teen years, research shows a notable trend toward more negative parenting styles as compared to earlier childhood years. A particular pattern identified in the research is that the decline in parenting is most prominent during early adolescence where conflict and secrecy increase. This dip in early adolescence is likely to be due to the teen’s drive for autonomy which often leads to increases in conflict.

A quick glance over the parenting variables examined in the past research such as control, prohibition, and power, reveal a prevalence of negatively oriented constructs being tested in teen-parent studies. But what of the stability of more positively oriented constructs of parenting over time?

Does positive parenting stand the test of time or does it also take a ‘nosedive’ in the teenage years? 

Here, it is fair to say, the answer is still unclear as there have been few studies exploring the changes to positive aspects of parenting over time. The small amount of research that has been done, however, suggests that positive aspects of parenting decline during the pre-teen and early teen years. This has been found for parental warmth, parental closeness, and parental support – all of which decrease in pre-teen and teen years.

No studies have examined possible changes in strength-based parenting across time yet it is possible that strength-based parenting, like many other aspects of parenting, diminishes across the teen years. 

The reduced knowledge of parents about their teens, together with reduced teen-parent closeness and increased parent-teen conflict may provide parents with fewer opportunities to see and acknowledge their teen’s strengths. Increased conflict between parents and their teens may make it more challenging for parents to see the strengths in their child, and/or may make the teen feel the conflict is occurring because the parent is only seeing their problem behaviors and is not acknowledging their positive qualities. 

Increased self-doubt in teenagers may also mean that, even if the parent remains constant in their strength-based approach, the teen is not able to consistently absorb and integrate the positive feedback. For these reasons, and in-line with the research on ‘parenting variance’ it is reasonable to assume that strength-based parenting will decline through the pre-teen and into the early teen years.

The Current Study

Prior studies of strength-based parenting have relied on single-time-point or two-time-point designs. While these studies have usefully identified wellbeing outcomes of strength-based parenting, more research is required to test if strength-based parenting changes over time and, additionally, how the relationship between strength-based parenting and wellbeing changes over time. 

The sample for this study comprised 202 adolescent students across years 7–9 (between the ages of 12-15) from a public secondary school in Victoria, Australia. Students completed a 30-minute online survey during school hours across three time points and their surveys were matched based on a unique ID number. Strength-Based Parenting was assessed using the SBPQ - students rated the degree of strength-based parenting they felt they were receiving from their parents at each point in time across 14 months. Subjective Wellbeing was assessed by measuring the students' self reports of life satisfaction together with positive affect and negative affect.

When examining the causal relationships between strength-based parenting and subjective wellbeing, two different statistical models were applied: latent growth curve models (LGM) and random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM). You can learn more detail by reading the full paper at Frontiers in Psychology.

What did we find? 

Understanding the role of positive parenting on wellbeing in pre-teens and teens was the focus of this study. Based on findings in past research, it was hypothesized that subjective wellbeing and strength-based parenting would decline and that the connection between strength-based parenting and subjective wellbeing would weaken over time.

Results found that subjective wellbeing and strength-based parenting both significantly diminished over time. Additionally, teens who reported a decrease in strength-based parenting over the study period also tended to experience declines in life satisfaction and positive affect, but no change to the trajectory of negative affect. 

The decline in wellbeing during early adolescence is highly consistent with past research and is likely to be a function of the significant life changes young people go through when stepping into the second decade of their lives. Developmental psychologists have long identified that the shift from childhood into adolescence marks a time of intense change that puts early adolescents at risk of mental ill-health.

Importantly, neuroscientists have also shown that the type of parenting that occurs in the life of a young person transitioning into early adolescence has a significant impact on mental health. For example, in a study conducted by my colleagues at the University of Melbourne lead by Professor Schwartz on the impact of parent communication in brain development of early teens found that those whose teens parents had displayed contemptuous, angry, impatient, belligerent, disapproving, threatening, or argumentative behaviors during a lab experiment in their late childhood were more likely to experience the onset of depressive symptoms and major depression in adolescence. Conversely, early teens whose parents related to them in approving, validating, affectionate, humorous, happy, pleasant, and/or caring ways, showed beneficial brain growth in regions that support a teenager’s capacity for social-emotional functioning as well as declines in areas that make an early adolescent vulnerable to mental illness.

In line with the past research that highlights the importance of positive parenting for youth wellbeing, this study revealed that when pre-teens and teens are asked to reflect on the parenting they receive and, at the same time, report on their wellbeing, a significant, positive relationship is present. These results are consistent with those found across multiple samples of teens where strength-based parenting has been related to a range of wellbeing indicators such as subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction, happiness and self-efficacy, subjective happiness, and family happiness.

The fact that strength-based parenting was related to life satisfaction and positive affect in real time in our sample suggests that parents can contribute to the wellbeing of their sons and daughters at each step along the way by committing to regularly helping their pre-teens and teens cultivate their strengths.

However, an important finding in the current study was the non-significant relationship between strength-based parenting and subjective wellbeing over time. While the degree of strength-based parented teens reported that they were receiving was linked to their levels of life satisfaction and positive affect in ‘real time’ this relationship did not transfer to longer time frames. That is, strength-based parenting at time one was not predictive of subjective wellbeing at time two or three (6 and 14 months later). Likewise, strength-based parenting at time two was not predictive of subjective wellbeing at time three (9 months later). 

These results indicate that parents cannot assume that their prior, or current, levels of strength-based parenting are ‘banked’ by their children to support future wellbeing. Instead, strength-based parenting needs to be a frequent, ongoing approach. 

The findings of this research study are relevant for parents and professionals working with parents and encourage parents to maintain a consistent strength-based approach over time so as to avoid the more typical patterns of parent-child decline in early adolescence and to uphold the mental health benefits that come from strength-based parenting.

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This article was pulled from a journal article called Observing Change Over Time in Strength-Based Parenting and Subjective Wellbeing for Pre-teens and Teens co-authored by Daniel J Loton, Dawson Grace, Rowan Jacques-Hamilton and Michael J. Zyphur in Frontiers in Psychology. The article in its entirety and references can be accessed here.

Photo credits (in order of appearance): Sheri Hooley/Unsplash, Sofia Kuniakina/Unsplash, Emma Bauso/Pexels, Sheri Hooley/Unsplash, Benjamin Ranger/Unsplash, Саша Лазарев/Pexels, nastya_gepp/Pixabay.

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