Perceived Parental Monitoring, Adolescent Disclosure, and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: A Longitudinal Examination

Abstract

Parental monitoring has long been stressed as an important parenting practice in reducing adolescents' susceptibility to depressive symptoms. Reviews have revealed, however, that measures of monitoring have been confounded with parental knowledge, and that the role of adolescent disclosure has been neglected. In the present study, adolescents (N=2,941; 51.3% female) were surveyed each year from grades 9-12. To disentangle parenting factors, bidirectional associations among parental knowledge, adolescent disclosure, and parental monitoring (i.e., solicitation and control) were examined. Higher parental knowledge was associated with lower adolescent depressive symptoms over time. Adolescent disclosure and parental control also predicted lower adolescent depressive symptoms indirectly through knowledge. Conversely, higher adolescent depressive symptoms predicted lower parental knowledge, adolescent disclosure, and parental solicitation over time, highlighting the bidirectional nature of associations among parenting factors and adolescent depressive symptoms. Importantly, these effects were invariant across gender and grade, suggesting that interventions can be broadly based.