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Category: Project

Description: Parenting a teen can be a challenge. Depression, substance use, and minor delinquency steeply increase during adolescence. Although parents are in a unique position to counter these adaptation problems, there aren’t simple pieces of parenting advice that work for every family. Tailoring advice to the family-specific needs and strengths may help parents in their important task of promoting adolescent behavioral and emotional well-being, but requires a more in-depth understanding how parenting works in individual families. In the ADAPT-program, researchers will assess how parenting affects every adolescent’s well-being in a different way, using smart phone applications with micro-questionnaires. This will answer questions, such as: In how many families do general parenting principles apply? What explains heterogeneity in parenting processes? How can being strict initially trigger resistance, but lead to better adaptation in the longer run? These new theoretical insights can help to tailor future parenting advice to the family’s specific needs and strengths.