Parenting and adolescent anxiety within families: a biweekly longitudinal study

Abstract

Background: Anxiety symptoms among adolescents have been increasing globally. The present study aimed to better understand the role of parenting, which is believed to act as both a risk and protective factor for anxiety while also being impacted by adolescent anxiety. Specifically, this preregistered study examined the bidirectional associations between parental autonomy support, intrusiveness, and symptoms of generalized anxiety in adolescents.

Methods: We used meso-longitudinal data of Dutch adolescents (N = 256, M_age = 14.4, age range = 12-17, 71.5% female, t_mean = 17.7) and their parents (N = 176, M_age = 46.8, 82% female, t_mean = 22). They reported biweekly on parental intrusiveness and autonomy support and on adolescent generalized anxiety symptoms. Dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) was used to examine the associations at the between- and within-family levels.

Results: The between-family level associations indicated that adolescents from families with lower levels of parental autonomy support and higher levels of parental intrusiveness exhibited higher levels of generalized anxiety symptoms. Within families, during weeks when parents were less autonomy supportive or more intrusive, adolescents also experienced more generalized anxiety symptoms. Regarding the bidirectional time-lagged effects, adolescent-driven, but not parent-driven, effects emerged. Specifically, when adolescents experienced more generalized anxiety symptoms than usual, their parents were less autonomy supportive and more intrusive 2 weeks later.

Conclusions: Although further research is needed, these findings underscore the negative impact of adolescents' mental health issues on parenting. To prevent the further escalation of family problems, it seems vital to promote positive and adaptive parent-child interactions when adolescents face mental health issues.

Keywords: Adolescence; autonomy support; generalized anxiety symptoms; intrusiveness; within‐family level.

Figure 1

Example of model. A = Adolescent Generalized Anxiety (yellow), P = Parenting (blue). The left panel shows person‐mean centering. Blue and yellow latent factors show within‐family variance in parenting and adolescent anxiety, respectively. Gray latent factors refer to between‐family variance. The right lower panel shows the between‐family correlation (H1). The right upper panel shows the estimation of within‐family correlations (H2). Furthermore, it was estimated whether Parenting (P) predicts changes in anxiety over time (A) (ɸAP; H3.1), and whether anxiety predicts changes in parenting over time (ɸPA; H3.2). The model controls for the autoregressive effects of anxiety (ɸAA) and parenting (ɸPP)