Patterns of parenting across adolescence.

The parent-adolescent relationship has received considerable attention throughout the twentieth century because of developmental changes that occur in both children and parents during this period. Different renditions of the nature of the parent-adolescent relationship have been offered. These range from the classic storm and stress characterizations to the currently popular, more modest estimates of “transformations” (Baumrind, 1991)— but all posit change. Some research on change has assessed the quality of the relationship between parents and adolescents (for example, the level of closeness or conflict), grounding the work in psychoanalytic, sociobiological, or cognitivedevelopmental theories (Blos, 1979; Laursen and Collins, 1988; Smetana, 1988; Steinberg, 1989). Empirical evidence is mixed, depending in part on whether the focal aspects of the relationship are time spent together, types of conflicts, or levels of closeness. Conger and Ge (1999) suggest that much of this inconsistency is due to methodological problems in the mix of studies, and they offer their own findings of gradual increases in conflict/ hostility and decrease in cohesion/warmth/supportiveness. An approach to examine change in the parent-child relationship during adolescence that has received less consistent attention has been the