Supportive parenting and adolescent adjustment across time in former East and West Germany

Abstract

Using a 3-year longitudinal data set, we examined the effects of consistently versus inconsistently supportive parenting on several aspects of adolescent adjustment. Supportive parenting was a multidimensional construct which included parental sensitivity, predictability and involvement. The sample consisted of 283 German early adolescents (mean age=11.4 years, S.D.=1.2 at time 1) from former East (n=97) and West (n=186) Germany. As hypothesized, adolescents who reported their parents to be consistently supportive (e.g. supportive for at least two points in time) had lower levels of depression and delinquency, higher levels of self-efficacy and did better in school over the 3-year period than adolescents who reported their parents to be inconsistently supportive (e.g. supportive at only one time point or less). The results showed that there were no significant interactions between region and supportive parenting, indicating that the effects of consistently supportive parenting "worked" in a similar manner in both contexts of former East and West Germany. Results also reveal that supportive parenting is not necessarily a stable phenomenon, but may fluctuate from year to year.