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Parenting, Peers and Psychosocial Adjustment: Are the Same—or Different—Children Affected by Each?

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Abstract

The prospective research presented herein extends work on parent and peer effects on adolescent psychosocial adjustment by looking beyond average effects. Instead, it considers variation in susceptibility to each source of influence in order to assess the extent to which those individuals most and least susceptible to parent effects are similarly—or differentially—susceptible to peer effects. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1364, 48.3% female, age range: 10–15 yrs., race/ethnicity: 80.4% white, 12.9% black and 6.7% other) was analyzed to assess the degree to which each child was susceptible to parent and peer effects. Toward this end, an influence statistic, DFBETAS, was used. A significant and moderate positive association between the two susceptibility effects indicated that children most or least susceptible to the effects of quality of parenting proved to be similarly affected by their peers, although this was not the case for a substantial minority of youth. The fact that at least some children vary dramatically in the effects to which they are most susceptible is discussed with respect to potential targets of intervention, namely, parents or peers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the assistance of the many families and collaborators involved in the NICHD Study of Child Care and Youth Development. Without their extensive participation, this report could not have been prepared. Reviewers’ comments improved the manuscript and thus their anonymous contributions should be acknowledged.

Authors’ Contributions

K.S. participated in conceiving the study, planning its design, conducting statistical analysis, drafting the manuscript and interpreting the data; X.Z. participated in conceiving the study, planning its design, conducting statistical analysis, drafting the manuscript and interpreting the data; J.B. participated in conceiving the study, planning its design, drafting the manuscript and interpreting the data; L.S. contributed to drafting the manuscript and interpreting the data. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

All data collected for the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, including those used in this report, were funded by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. No funding supported work on the current paper.

Data Sharing and Declaration

The datasets analyzed for the current study are available in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development repository at the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR): https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/DSDR/studies/21942.

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  1. Department of Human Ecology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, 3321 Hart Hall, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Kristina Sayler, Xiaoya Zhang & Jay Belsky

  2. Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Laurence Steinberg

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  1. Kristina Sayler
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Correspondence to Kristina Sayler.

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All data gathered for the NICHD Study of Child Care and Youth Development, including those used in this report, were collected with the approval of each participating university’s Internal Review Board.

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All data collected for the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, including those used in this report, were obtained after securing informed consent of the child’s mother (or custodial parent) and, at age 15, the child as well.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

Frequency of Missingness for Study Variables

Table 5

Table 5 Frequency of Missingness for Study Variables
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Sayler, K., Zhang, X., Steinberg, L. et al. Parenting, Peers and Psychosocial Adjustment: Are the Same—or Different—Children Affected by Each?. J Youth Adolescence 51, 443–457 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-022-01574-9

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