Relationships Between Parent and Adolescents

This article aimed to study the relationship between the climate in parent-adolescent relationships and adolescent's openness with their parents. More specifically, adolescents who experienced greater approval from their parents were predicted to be more open with their parents compared to those children who experienced disconfirmation.

According to the article, an important part of confirmation is encouraging further communication. This happens because of how confirmation provides a chance for thoughts and feelings to be expressed. Oppositely, when disconfirmation occurs, communication is discouraged because of opposing perspectives, along with rejection and denial. Adolescents who viewed their parents as supportive, attentive, and caring of their viewpoint reported a more open relationship. Again, the opposite is true for those adolescents who had contrary views of their parents. However, one of the largest insights gained from the study in this article is that adolescents played a larger role than parents in creating the relational climates as well as their own openness. Adolescent's own confirmation behavior was positively related to their openness, especially for female adolescents. In general, despite similar confirming behavior over time by parents, what really determined the level of openness of adolescents was their own behavior. As interpreted by this study, adolescent's openness may be driven by their own personal characteristics. Another explanation for how adolescents play a larger role than their parents in determining their openness is that parents have little effect on openness in general during adolescence. Complete openness with parents is not exactly optimal, as adolescents have a need autonomy and a need to gain independence as they grow. However, they still believe that there is an importance in openness in family relationships.

This article relates to my topic closely in the way that it studies what effects parental communication, particularly parental confirmation and disconfirmation, have on their adolescent children. In general, parental confirmation led to family openness, in which adolescents were open with their parents when they acknowledged confirmation from their parents. Just the opposite was true when disconfirmation was often present in parent-adolescent interactions. Additionally, adolescents' own behavior shaped how open or closed they were as well. Therefore, a combination of both parental confirmation/disconfirmation and adolescent's own behavior is what shaped whether an adolescent was open or closed in interaction with family members, and therefore, whether there was an open or closed family environment.

This article does not seem to take communication beyond the home level. There is strictly a focus on whether family communication is open or closed due to different factors. Additionally, different parental communication