How Should Parents React to the Onset of Their Adolescents’ Risk Behavior? A Longitudinal Study of Bedouin and Jewish Adolescents

How should parents react to the onset of their adolescents' risk behavior? A longitudinal study of Bedouin and Jewish Adolescents

Abstract As part of normative development many early adolescents experiment with some risk-behaviors. When parents respond inappropriately, these risk-behaviors may intensify and undermine adjustment. While there is much research on general parenting practices predicting the development of early-emerging severe risk-behaviors, very little research has examined parents’ reactive-responses to the onset of risk-behaviors in adolescence, particularly in different cultures.

The proposed model examines potentially effective and harmful parental responses and the processes mediating and moderating them across two cultural groups. We hypothesize that adolescents' risk-behavior and socio-emotional maladjustment will be reduced, in both Jewish and Bedouin adolescents in Israel, by parental responses involving autonomy-support, limit-setting, and minimal harsh-control. These responses are hypothesized to reduce negative adolescent outcomes through adolescents' experience of parents as satisfying basic psychological needs, which then promotes autonomous-motivation to refrain from risk behaviors, and disclosure of risk-behaviors to parents.

Parental responses that adolescents view as moderately-controlling – warnings, controlling-monitoring, and resource-removal - are expected to have less harmful effects on Bedouin adolescents because they view them as more legitimate, and are less inclined to view mild risk-behaviors as belonging to the personal domain.

Preliminary studies (Assor et al., 2015; Maree, Yithaki, & Assor, 2016; Sher-Censor al., in preparation; see Miscellanies section of the application), using concurrent measures, suggest that parents' reactive-responses to risk-behavior-onset have unique effects, above and beyond general parenting practices, and provide initial support for the model. The research will allow for a more rigorous test, using a 4-wave, longitudinal, multi-informant, study of 990 Bedouin and Jewish adolescents and their parents, who have reported on-line first adolescent risk-behavior engagement during the 7-8th grade.

The results can help to construct evidence-based programs aimed at assisting parents in their attempts to cope effectively with emerging adolescent risk-behaviors in different cultures.