Parent-adolescent discrepancies in adolescents' competence and the balance of adolescent autonomy and adolescent and parent well-being in the context of Type 1 diabetes

Abstract

This study examined whether intrafamily discrepancies in perceptions of the adolescent's competence and independence were associated with autonomy and well-being for adolescents and parents. The ways in which mothers and fathers consistently differed from their adolescent across measures of independence and competence regarding Type 1 diabetes, a stressful context for families, were examined with the latent discrepancy model. A sample of 185 adolescents (mean age = 12.5 years, SD = 1.3), their mothers, and participating fathers completed measures of the adolescent's independence in completing diabetes tasks, problems with diabetes management, adherence to the medical regimen, measures of well-being, and metabolic control. The latent discrepancy model was conducted via structural equation modeling that generated latent discrepancies from the adolescent for mothers and fathers. Both mothers and fathers viewed the adolescent's competence more negatively than did the adolescent. These discrepancies related to more parental encouragement of independence and adolescent autonomy but also to poorer metabolic control and poorer parental psychosocial well-being. The results are interpreted within a developmental perspective that views discrepancies as reflecting normative developmental processes of autonomy but as being associated with disruptions in well-being in the short term.

Figure 1

A portion of the structural equation model illustrating the constraints applied to generate individual-item latent discrepancies between the parents and adolescents, in this case for reports of adherence. Unmarked latent variables are node latent variables with intercepts and residual variances fixed to zero. They are necessary to construct the difference score latent variables.

Figure 2

The full latent discrepancy model consisting of second-order factors to capture how mothers and fathers were consistently discrepant from their own adolescent. Several estimated parameters are not drawn for space, these parameters are covariances between the Adolescent factors (AA, AAE, ABI, & APD) with each other and the Discrepancy factors, factor means for the Mother and Father Discrepancies, and adolescent factors (values for these are in Table 1). All other means and intercepts fixed to zero.

Figure 3

Mean levels of the discrepancy factors. A zero represents a view that is the same as the adolescent. Positive values are indicative of parents viewing the adolescent as less competent and independent than the adolescent rates himself/herself. The error bars show one standard deviation in either direction taken from the square root of the factor variances.