Emerging adulthood lies between adolescence and adulthood, and is filled with changes, challenges, and opportunities (Arnett, 2000). This life stage is marked by substantial life transformation and vulnerability as individuals find their place in the adult world (Syed & Seiffge-Krenke, 2013) amid changing relationships with family, peers, and romantic partners (Agueda et al., 2013; Joyner & Campa, 2016), and increases in both risk-taking (Pharo et al., 2011) and responsibilities (Arnett & Padilla-Walker, 2015). A range of positive skills and attributes are crucial for successfully navigating this transition into adulthood (Hawkins et al., 2017). Young people who actively engage in life, and who develop effective communication skills, foresight, and perseverence are more likely to thrive and attain positive outcomes in areas of education, employment, health, mental health, and social wellbeing (Anderson Moore & Lippman, 2005). Emerging adults without these positive aspects of development may be more likely to struggle across these areas, make poor decisions, and fail to sufficiently prepare for adulthood (Steinberg, 2008). The presence or absence of positive traits and attributes have been shown to be relatively stable, persisting from emerging adulthood into adulthood (Hawkins et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2015) and parenthood, influencing the long-term outcomes not just for individuals, but the next generation as well (Schofield et al., 2011).

Introduction 

Positive Development During Emerging Adulthood

There are a wide range of models for positive development, each emphasising different aspects of young peoples’ development, and the context in which they live (O’Connor et al., 2011). Two of the most well-established models are the Developmental Assets Model and the 5 C’s of Positive Youth Development (Silbereisen & Lerner, 2007). The Search Institute’s Developmental Assets Model describes 40 supports and strengths that can help a young person to live an effective and healthy life; including aspects of themselves, their family, their school, and their community (Benson, 2007). Lerner’s 5 C’s of Positive Youth Development comprises five strengths: competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring (Bowers et al., 2010). When a young person exhibits all five strengths, they are likely to be on a trajectory that is beneficial to themselves and others, characterised by the sixth “C” of “contribution” to one’s self, family, community, and civil society (Silbereisen & Lerner, 2007). The overarching theme across models of positive development is that, in order for young people to flourish, they need to develop a diverse set of positive internal skills and attributes. These often include strengths such as morality, initiative, identity, resilience, thinking ahead, social functioning, engagement, and positive perceptions of oneself, others and the world (Bornstein, 2008; O’Connor et al., 2011). In addition, the models describe internal and external factors that support or hinder the development of these skills and attributes (van de Vijver, 2017).

The internal factors relate to characteristics of the young person, such as their physiological development, gender (Steinberg et al., 2009), temperament, and personality (O’Connor et al., 2011). External factors such as supportive peer relationships (O’Connor et al., 2011), school climate (Lindstrom Johnson et al., 2016), and area socioeconomic status (Nguyen et al., 2012) are also important for fostering young people’s positive development. Within the family environment, supportive factors include parental employment (Wheeler et al., 2014) and educational attainment (Dubow et al., 2009), and family economic wellbeing (Neppl et al., 2015).

The Effects of Adversity on Positive Development

Adversities experienced in the family environment may, however, hinder young people from developing the qualities that can help them to live happy, healthy lives. Adversity can have wide-ranging impacts on physiological systems and processes that may impede positive development, such as elevated cortisol levels impairing cognition, a heightened autonomic nervous system priming the fight or flight response, and atypical brain development affecting cognition and stress responses (Aafjes-van Doorn et al., 2020; Sciaraffa et al., 2018). Family environments affected by adversities such as child maltreatment, domestic violence, substance abuse problems and mental health conditions may not be able to provide young people with adequate modelling, encouragement or opportunities for healthy communication, perseverance, future orientation and engagement. In addition, where parents themselves have poor positive development and are thus at risk for maltreatment and dysfunction, inherited traits such as personality may increase the likelihood that their children will also have poor positive development (O’Connor et al., 2011; Rothbart & Hwang, 2014). While these pathways indicate that adversity may impede young people’s ability to thrive, there is a dearth of research on the links between adversity and positive development as a broad construct. In recent years, however, some studies have investigated the relationship between adversity and single elements of positive development. For example, emerging adults have been shown to be less likely to develop positive self esteem if their parents have divorced (Connel et al., 2015), they were maltreated as a child (Dion et al., 2019), or they lived with someone with a substance use problem (Babad et al., 2020); and less likely to develop self-efficacy if they lived with someone with a mental health condition (Nilsen et al., 2016). There may additionally be a cumulative effect whereby the more types of adversity a young person experiences, the greater their risk for not developing skills such as self-control (Meldrum et al., 2019), task completion, and engagement (Anderson Moore & Ramirez, 2016), and the less likely they are to have positive perceptions of life (Davis et al., 2018). Ten types of family adversity that are commonly described across the world (Bellis et al., 2019) are known collectively as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs; Dube et al., 2001; Felitti et al., 1998). The ten ACEs comprise five types of maltreatment (physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect), and five types of household dysfunction (parental separation or divorce; domestic violence; and household mental health conditions, substance use problems, and incarceration) which may have cumulative impacts on health and wellbeing outcomes across the life course (Dube et al., 2001; Felitti et al., 1998). Emerging evidence indicates that some aspects of positive development may act as mechanisms by which ACEs affect these outcomes. For example, the Song and Qian (2020) study of 88,815 adolescents (13 to 19 years old) found that young people who had experienced ACEs were more likely to have poor self-regulation and school engagement; which subsequently increased their likelihood of risky sexual activity and pregnancy. Young people who have healthy positive development despite their experiences of adversity may, however, be protected from the harm of ACEs. For example, the Poole et al. (2017) study of 4006 adults found that respondents with low resilience were at risk for emotional dysregulation and anxiety after experiencing ACEs. Conversely, people with good resilience (i.e. those who are able to adapt to change, focus under pressure, and have humour regarding problems) were found to have less risk for emotional dysregulation and anxiety following adversity (Poole et al., 2017). Similar buffering effects were found by Edwards et al. (2014) in a sample of 765 emerging adult women. Experiencing multiple types of childhood maltreatment and domestic violence placed these women at risk for psychological distress, only if they did not have strong positive self-regard, confidence, and perseverence (Edwards et al., 2014).

Supporting Positive Development After Adversity

From the literature, it is clear that experiencing singular or multiple types of adversity may have a significant impact on the attainment of positive development for emerging adults. Given that it is not always possible to prevent or avoid adversity (Asmussen et al., 2020), work is needed to explore factors that have the capacity to prevent or reduce the impact of ACEs. Parenting is one such factor. Parents who use effective parenting practices and foster positive relationships with their children during their teen years can support them to develop the skills and attributes they need to successfully navigate through life (Burke et al., 2012). Supportive and communicative family relationships during adolescence foster a wide range of strengths during emerging adulthood, including perseverence, positive perceptions of oneself (Neppl et al., 2015) and others, independence, a sense of identity and responsibility, self control, planfulness (Price-Robertson et al., 2010), and constructive engagement with one’s community, family and self (Kaniušonytė & Žukauskienė, 2017). In contrast, however, ineffective parenting has potential to impede the development of positive skills and attributes. For example, aggression from one’s mother during adolescence has been shown to interfere with the development of optimism and life satisfaction during emerging adulthood (Deane et al., 2019). Conflicted relationships between emerging adults and their mothers is additionally associated with impairments to emotion regulation, social functioning, engagement with work, and self perceptions (Cheung et al., 2019).

The parenting and family relationships that young people experience may therefore be critical for supporting them to develop the qualities they need to navigate life. Emerging evidence suggests that parenting may also protect positive development from the deleterious effects of adversity. For example, while children who witness inter-parental violence are at risk for not developing crucial prosocial skills, they may be supported to do so if their parents are sensitive to their needs (Manning et al., 2014). A similar protective effect has been observed in the context of cumulative adversity, however this has generally focused on problem reduction, rather than strengths promotion. This was demonstrated in the Brown and Shillington (2017) study of 1054 adolescents, in whom the link between cumulative adversity and substance abuse risk was significantly reduced if they had been supported by a parent or other adult. Recent work has begun to explore the protective effect of parenting for positive development after adversity, with mixed results. The Chainey and Burke (2021) study of 298 Australian emerging adults indicated that positive development during emerging adulthood was not significantly affected by adversity experienced before age 18, and across all levels of adversity, positive development was significantly supported by parent-adolescent connectedness and monitoring. In contrast, the Chainey et al. (2022) analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children found that experiencing singular or multiple types of adversity between ages 4/5 and 14/15 significantly increased the likelihood that adolescents at age 16/17 would be in the lowest quartile on future orientation, rather than the highest. The risk conferred by adversity was built on by parenting, such that young people who experienced higher hostility, lower communication, and lower monitoring in the context of adversity were at even greater risk for being ranked among those with the lowest future orientation (Chainey et al., 2022). The emerging evidence therefore suggests that adversity and parenting may both have substantial impacts on young people’s positive development. Further exploration is needed, however, to understand the role that parents may play in supporting emerging adults affected by adversity to develop the positive skills and attributes they need to flourish and not flounder in the turbulent seas of emerging adulthood and beyond.

The Current Study

This paper investigates whether emerging adults who experienced singular or multiple types of adversity are at increased risk for having low levels of positive development; and whether parenting practices and the parent-adolescent relationship moderate that association. It was hypothesised that:

  1. 1.

    Emerging adults who experienced ACEs will have increased risk for low positive development (i.e. bottom quartile of respondents);

  2. 2.

    Risk for low positive development will be greater for emerging adults with cumulative adversity, in comparison to those with a single adversity; and

  3. 3.

    The associations between adversity and positive development will be weakened by effective parenting (connectedness, monitoring), and strengthened by ineffective parenting (hostility).

Method

Recruitment

A novel survey was conducted for the current study, named the Young Australia Survey. To ensure the sample included diverse emerging adults across the full “emerging adulthood” age range (18–25 years), respondents were recruited from a university and the wider community. The university respondents were recruited through a university school of psychology first year research participation scheme, in exchange for course credit. Community respondents were recruited from every state and territory in Australia, and offered the opportunity to enter a prize draw. To meet inclusion criteria, respondents had to be aged between 18 and 25 years and be a current resident of Australia. There were no exclusion criteria.

Ethics and Consent Procedures

The study was a non-experimental survey design, where respondents completed a non-identifiable quantitative survey at a single time point via hard copy or online. Informed consent was obtained from all respondents. Ethical approval was obtained from a university ethics board (approval 2,018,001,051). The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Sample

Of the 1017 survey respondents, data for 693 were retained for the current analysis. Data were excluded for 6 respondents residing outside of Australia, 262 respondents missing data on suburb of residence, ACEs or positive development measures, and 56 respondents who did not list their main caregiver as a biological parent (as the current analysis specifically refers to parenting). See Table 1 for demographic characteristics of the sample. Emerging adults in the sample ranged in age from 18 to 25 years (M = 20.39, SD = 2.29). Most participants (n = 620, 90%) answered the parenting questions in reference to their mothers. Parents’ ages (reported in 5-year age brackets) ranged from 26 to 65 years. Descriptive comparisons with the general Australian population of 18- to 25-year-olds represented in the 2016 Australian Census of Population and Housing (Table 1; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016) indicate that the analytic sample’s demographic characteristics follow similar patterns to the general population, however with over-representation of emerging adults who live in higher SES areas and major cities, and those who have parents with high levels of educational attainment and employment. Males are under-represented in the sample, as are emerging adults who are Indigenous or spoke a language other than English in their family home.

Table 1 Demographic characteristics of high and low positive development groups, total sample, and the Australian population
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To obtain a meaningful distinction between respondents with “high” and “low” positive development (Correia et al., 2018; Davidson, 2018), only respondents who scored in the top quartile (n = 156) or bottom quartile (n = 174) of the positive development measure were selected into the analytic dataset. The final analytic dataset comprised 330 emerging adults aged 18 to 25 years (M = 20.50, SD = 2.30). See Table 1 for the demographic characteristics of the two quartile groups.

Measures

Positive Development

Emerging adults’ current level of positive development was measured using the Positive Development subscale of the Adolescent Functioning Scale (AFS; Dittman et al., 2016). This measure was selected as it captures four internal, positively valanced elements that cut across models of positive development: perseverance, engagement, future orientation, and communication. The nine self-report items (e.g. “I have goals for the future”) are scored on a six-point Likert-type scale, from 0 (“Not at all true”) to 5 (“True most of the time”). Higher scores indicate higher levels of positive development in the emerging adult. Internal consistency in a previous sample of 298 Australian emerging adults was α = 0.72 (Chainey & Burke, 2021). In the current sample, internal consistency is α = 0.87.

Adversity

Respondents’ childhood experiences of adversity were measured with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (DeBelius, 2018; Felitti et al., 1998), a 10-item measure of 10 adversities experienced at any time prior to one’s 18th birthday: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse by a family member, mental illness of a family member, witnessing domestic violence, incarceration of a household member, parental separation or divorce, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. The item on sexual abuse was edited to remove sensitive details of sexual acts, to: “Did an adult, or person at least 5 years older than you, ever involve you in sexual acts?”. Respondents reported “yes” (1) or “no” (0) to each item, to indicate whether they had experienced each kind of adversity. The ten items were summed to provide a total scale score (ranging from 0 to 10) representing the number of adversities experienced. Internal consistency in a previous sample of Australian emerging adults was α = 0.76 (Chainey & Burke, 2021). The current internal consistency is α = 0.76. ACEs were dummy coded to compare participants with 0 ACEs, to those with 1 ACE, 2–3 ACEs, and 4 or more ACEs, to account for the reduced prevalence of the higher number of ACEs that is routinely seen across the literature, and produce bands representing levels of exposure that may meaningfully distinguish between participants who experience no ACEs, single ACEs, few ACEs, and multiple ACE (i.e. 4 + ACEs), the latter of which are often shown to be at greatest risk for poor outcomes (e.g. Bellis et al., 2019; Felitti et al., 1998).

Parenting

Respondents were asked to retrospectively report their perceptions of the parenting they experienced from their main caregiver around the time of their 15th birthday (adolescence). The age range for the parenting measure was selected to provide a specific time period on which to base responses, and to represent the developmental period of mid-adolescence, when young people generally live in their family home (Steinberg, 2016) prior to living independently during their late-adolescence or emerging adulthood (Agueda et al., 2013). Parenting was represented by three aspects of parenting and the parent-adolescent relationship (connectedness, hostility, monitoring) that have been previously linked to positive development outcomes. The measures were adapted in collaboration with the scale authors to be retrospective. For example, the item, “I talk to my parent about my plans,” was adapted to, “I talked to my parent about my plans”. These retrospective versions have previously been validated for use with emerging adults (Chainey & Burke, 2021).

Connectedness and hostility in the parent-adolescent relationship were measured using the Parent-Adolescent Relationship Scale (PARS; Burke et al., 2021) Connectedness (6 items, e.g., “My parent comforted me when I was upset”) and Hostility (5 items, e.g., “I complained about my parent”) subscales. Responses were provided on a six-point Likert-type scale ranging from 0 (“Not at all”) to 5 (“Nearly always, or always”). Higher mean scores on these subscales indicate higher perceived levels of those constructs in the parent-adolescent relationship. Internal consistency for the PARS subscales is most appropriately calculated using Hancock and Mueller’s (2001) H coefficient, to allow for unequal item variances and correlated error terms (Burke et al., 2021). The H coefficient is interpreted similarly to Cronbach’s alpha (Burke et al., 2021). In a previous sample of Australian emerging adults, reliability was H = 0.93 for Connectedness, and H = 0.80 for Hostility (Burke et al., 2021). In the current sample, internal consistency is H = 0.95/α = 0.95 for Connectedness, and H = 0.87/α = 0.82 for Hostility.

Monitoring was measured using the Supportive Monitoring subscale of the Parent-Adolescent Monitoring Scale (Burke et al., 2020), a measure of the ways parents monitor their adolescents’ activities and whereabouts, e.g., “I talked to my parent about my plans”. Items were rated on a six-point Likert-type scale from 0 (“Not at all”) to 5 (“Nearly always, or always”). Higher mean scores indicate higher levels of perceived monitoring during adolescence. Internal consistency in a previous sample of Australian emerging adults was α = 0.84 (Chainey & Burke, 2021), and α = 0.87 in the current sample.

Demographic Characteristics

Respondents were asked to provide information on a range of demographic characteristics, referring to the present (i.e., the time of survey completion) and when they were 15 years old. These characteristics have previously been identified as significant predictors of adversity and/or positive development (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2017; Bellis et al., 2014a, b; Bellis et al., 2014a, b; O’Connor et al., 2020; Soares et al., 2016; Steinberg et al., 2009). They included respondents’ age, gender and Indigenous status; current suburb and postcode (used to calculate area socioeconomic status and remoteness), main caregiver’s educational attainment and employment status when respondents were 15 years old, and main language spoken at home when respondents were 15 years old. Parents’ age (in five-year age brackets) and state/territory of residence were also collected and used to describe the sample.

Results

Descriptive Analysis

Response distributions were used to describe the sample and identify issues that may affect analyses, such as range restrictions and departures from normality. Bivariate associations were conducted to explore the relationships between constructs and inform the interpretation of coefficients from multivariate analyses.

Positive Development

In the larger dataset (n = 693), before being refined to include only the respondents in the “high” or “low” positive development groups, the median (Md) positive development score was 3.33 (M = 3.21, SD = 0.80). Only the respondents in the first quartile of scores (the “low positive development” group, n = 174) and in the fourth quartile of scores (the “high positive development” group, n = 156) were included in the analytic dataset. The first quartile scores ranged from 0.56 to 2.67 (Md = 2.28, M = 2.15, SD = 0.48), and the fourth quartile scores ranged from 3.89 to 5.00 (Md = 4.11, M = 4.21, SD = 0.28). The distribution of positive development mean subscale scores across the four quartiles is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig.1
figure 1

Positive development scores of respondents in the low, medium and high positive development groups

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Adversity

An estimated 66% of respondents from the ‘low’ and ‘high’ positive development groups had experienced adversity, with 22% experiencing one type of adversity, 14% experiencing 2 types, 9% experiencing 3 types, and 21% experiencing between 4 and 9 types of adversity. One-third (34%) of respondents had not experienced any of the ten ACEs. All ten types of ACEs were reported by respondents, with each type accruing between 7 and 112 reports. Household mental health problems, emotional neglect, parental separation or divorce, and emotional abuse were the most common types of adversity, each experienced by approximately one-third of the analytic sample. Sexual abuse, domestic violence, material neglect and incarceration were the least common, each reported by less than 10% of the sample. Incarceration and material neglect were only reported alongside other adversities (i.e., by respondents with 2 or more ACEs). All other adversities were reported either as the sole adversity experienced, or as occurring alongside other ACEs (see Fig. 2 for a summary of the adversities reported by respondents in the analytic dataset).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Proportion of respondents experiencing each type of adversity, by the number of adversities experienced

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Parenting

Scores on the parenting subscales spanned the entire possible range of each subscale (i.e., 0 to 5). Skew and kurtosis values were within the acceptable range of -2 to + 2, and were thus unlikely to cause problems with analyses (George & Mallery, 2011). Respondents tended to report high levels of connectedness and monitoring, and low levels of hostility (see Table 2 for descriptive statistics for the parenting subscales).

Table 2 Descriptive statistics of scores on the parenting subscales for the analytic sample
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Bivariate Associations Between Positive Development and Adversity, and Other Predictors

Table 3 presents results of bivariate associations conducted between all focal variables. As displayed in Fig. 3, positive development significantly differed according to the number of adversities experienced. Tests of independence (using the χ2 statistic) indicated that respondents with 0 ACEs or 1 ACE were more likely to be in the high positive development group, while respondents with 2–3 ACEs or 4 + ACEs were more likely to be in the low positive development group, p = 0.003. Females had significantly higher rates of being in the high positive development group than males, p = 0.007. Kruskal–Wallis tests revealed that respondents in the high positive development group had higher levels of connectedness (Median (Md) = 4.00) and monitoring (Md = 4.00), and lower levels of hostility (Md = 1.60) than respondents in the low positive development group (Mds = 2.50, 2.80, 2.20 respectively), ps < 0.001.

Table 3 Bivariate associations between positive development, adversity, parenting and demographic variables for the analytic sample
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Fig. 3
figure 3

Proportion of respondents with low and high positive development, by the number of adversities experienced

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Kruskal Wallis tests indicated connectedness, hostility, and monitoring significantly differed depending on experiences of adversity, ps < 0.001. Follow-up Mann–Whitney tests revealed that respondents with 1 ACE had significantly higher levels of connectedness (Md = 3.83) and monitoring (Md = 3.40), and lower levels of hostility (Md = 1.80) than respondents with 2–3 ACEs (Md = 2.17, 2.60, 2.40 respectively), zconnectedness = 5.27, zhostility = -2.97, zmonitoring = 3.99, ps < 0.001. There were no significant differences in connectedness, hostility, or monitoring between respondents with 0 ACEs and 1 ACE, or between respondents with 2–3 ACEs and 4 + ACEs, ps > 0.05. Tests of independence (χ2) indicated that respondents who spoke a language other than English at home or lived in a regional or remote area were more likely to have 0 ACEs, and were less likely to have 4 + ACEs than respondents who spoke English or lived in a major city. Mann–Whitney U tests revealed that respondents with 4 + ACEs tended to live in areas with significantly lower SES (Md = 7) than respondents with 0 ACEs (Md = 9), z = 3.88, p = 0.001.

Are Emerging Adults with ACEs at Greater Risk for Low Positive Development?

Logistic regression was conducted to identify whether adversity contributes to the odds that an emerging adult has low positive development, rather than high positive development, when controlling for demographic characteristics (Table 4). Continuous variables were median-centred prior to analysis. In the model including only demographic control variables (Model 1), odds for low positive development were significantly higher in males (OR = 2.08, p = 0.005), and lower in respondents living in higher SES areas (OR = 0.90, p = 0.032). Model 2 included dummy variables for adversity. In this model, gender was the only significant demographic predictor, indicating that males had odds for low positive development 2.40 times higher than females, p = 0.001. As predicted, emerging adults had significantly higher risk for low positive development if they had experienced 2–3 ACEs (OR = 2.44, p = 0.006) or 4 or more ACEs (OR = 3.10, p = 0.001), than if they had experienced 0 ACEs. Contrary to expectations, there was no significant difference in risk for low positive development between respondents with 0 ACEs and respondents with 1 ACE, p = 0.977.

Table 4 Logistic regression results predicting low positive development
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Does Parenting Moderate the Relationship Between Positive Development and Adversity?

The regression model was expanded to explore whether parenting moderates the association between adversity and positive development. First, parenting subscales were added to the model of demographic characteristics and adversity (Table 4). In this model (Model 3), odds for low positive development were lower in older respondents (OR = 0.84, p = 0.004) and higher in males (OR = 1.97, p = 0.024). The previously observed association between adversity and risk for low positive development was no longer significant when parenting was accounted for, ps > 0.05. Odds of low positive development were lower for emerging adults who experienced higher levels of monitoring (OR = 0.58, p < 0.001). Connectedness and hostility were not significant predictors of positive development, ps > 0.05.

To investigate whether parenting moderated the association between adversity and positive development, three moderation models were created (Table 5). Each model included the same predictors as Model 3, as well as interactions between the three adversity dummy variables and one parenting subscale. A Bonferroni correction was used to achieve a familywise alpha of 0.05 across the three moderation models, so predictor significance was assessed at the p < 0.016 level (Mundfrom et al., 2006). A significant interaction in the hostility moderation model indicated that the increased risk for low positive development that was associated with having 4 + ACEs (rather than 0 ACEs) differed according to the level of hostility experienced (OR = 0.37, p = 0.012). The qualified main effect of hostility (OR = 2.30, p = 0.006) remained significant in the presence of the interaction, however the main effect of 0 ACEs vs. 4 + ACEs did not (p = 0.967). Despite the presence of a significant interaction, there were no significant simple effects. This indicates that the relationship between ACEs and positive development differed depending on the level of hostility reported; but was not statistically different when comparing respondents with high hostility vs. median hostility, or median hostility vs. low hostility, ps > 0.05. Visualisation of the interaction (Fig. 4) revealed that this may be due to a cross-over interaction, wherein emerging adults with 4 + ACEs have overall greater risk for poor positive development than emerging adults with 0 ACEs (as indicated by the significant main effect), but this is not the case for emerging adults who experienced high hostility. For these young people, experiencing 0 ACEs was associated with greater risk than experiencing 4 + ACEs. The graph further indicates that hostility did not affect the risk for poor positive development among emerging adults who had experienced 4 + ACEs, but did affect the risk among emerging adults with 0 ACEs.

Table 5 Moderated logistic regression results predicting low positive development
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Fig. 4
figure 4

Probability of low positive development, based on number of adversities and level of hostility. Note. Low hostility = 16th percentile, high hostility = 84th percentile

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The absence of significant interactions in the connectedness and monitoring moderation models indicated that the relationship between adversity and positive development was not moderated by connectedness or monitoring (ps > 0.05). The significant main effects of adversity and monitoring on positive development observed in model 3 were therefore additive (Fig. 5). Emerging adults who experienced adversity or low monitoring were at increased risk for poor positive development, and risk was greatest for emerging adults who experienced adversity alongside low monitoring. Additional linear regression analyses revealed that the direction and significance of relationships between the predictors and positive development were largely consistent across logistic and linear analyses (see Supplementary tables 1 and 2).

Fig. 5
figure 5

Probability of low positive development, based on number of adversities and level of monitoring. Note. Low monitoring = 16th percentile, high hostility = 84th percentile

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Discussion

This study investigated the associations between emerging adults’ positive development and their past experiences of adversity and parenting. The results indicate that emerging adults may be less likely to develop strong levels of perseverance, future orientation, engagement, and communication skills if they experienced multiple adversities during their childhood and adolescence, or if they received low levels of monitoring during their adolescence. High hostility in the parent-adolescent relationship additionally conferred risk to emerging adults who had not experienced ACEs. It is therefore important for parents to engage in supportive monitoring and non-hostile relationships with their adolescent children, to support them to navigate adolescence and emerging adulthood, regardless of their past experiences of adversity.

Experiencing adversity is known to hinder young people from developing positive skills and attributes such as self-control (Meldrum et al., 2019), task completion, school engagement (Anderson Moore & Ramirez, 2016), and future orientation (Chainey et al., 2022). The current study builds our understanding in this area, indicating that experiencing multiple ACEs may also increase the risk that emerging adults will struggle to develop other aspects of positive development such as perseverance and effective communication. This effect may be due to the impact that adversity can have on physiological systems and processes (Aafjes-van Doorn et al., 2020; Sciaraffa et al., 2018); a lack of adequate modelling, encouragement and opportunities for positive development in family environments with adversity; and intergenerational cycles wherein parents with poor positive development are at risk for child maltreatment and living with dysfunction, and pass on the risk for poor positive development to their children (O’Connor et al., 2011; Rothbart & Hwang, 2014).

The current results contrast those of Chainey and Burke (2021), which indicated that adversity was not related to emerging adults’ overall level of positive development. The current study shows that adversity can increase young people’s risk for being in the lowest quartile of positive development, and is also related to lower overall levels of positive development. The differing results between these two studies may be due to the increased power of the current study, and its use of adversity exposure categories. While Chainey and Burke (2021) analysed adversity as a count variable from one to ten, the current study used categories to account for the lower prevalence of higher ACE scores and interrogate the distinction between singular, few, and many adversities. This approach is in keeping with the majority of previous ACEs literature, which identifies those with multiple adversities as the most at risk (e.g. Bellis et al., 2019; Felitti et al., 1998; Kalmakis & Chandler, 2015). The current results align with that research, indicating that risk for poor positive development incrementally increases with exposure, and young people within the ‘multiple adversity’ group may collectively be understood as at highest risk. Without healthy levels of positive development, these emerging adults may not function well or successfully transition into adulthood (Hawkins et al., 2017). Young people who are supported to develop the necessary qualities may, however, enjoy high levels of social, emotional, and behavioural wellbeing across their life course (Anderson Moore & Lippman, 2005). Reducing the prevalence of ACEs such as child maltreatment and household dysfunction are therefore clear and important priorities for improving the health and wellbeing of young people worldwide. It is unlikely, however, that these adversities will be eradicated in the near future (Asmussen et al., 2020).

Supplementing ACEs prevention with other approaches is therefore critical for supporting young people who have gone through maltreatment or dysfunctional home lives; or who may be at risk for these adversities. Families may be effective targets for this support, as they provide a key context in which young people may develop the skills they need for life (Lindstrom Johnson et al., 2014). Parenting is a central component of the family context, and building on previous evidence of the positive influence of parental encouragement on emerging adults’ engagement (Kaniušonytė & Žukauskienė, 2017), the current study’s results indicate that young people may benefit from having parents who encourage regular communication about their plans and activities. Parental monitoring may support emerging adults to develop a range of positive skills and attributes by providing opportunities to reflect on their actions and intentions (i.e., future orientation), articulate themselves and listen (i.e., communication), be guided towards constructive uses of their time (i.e., engagement), and be encouraged to spend their time working through challenges and barriers (i.e., perseverance). This observed association between monitoring and positive development was independent of the effect of adversity, which indicates that all young people may benefit from monitoring, regardless of their experiences of maltreatment and dysfunction.

The previously found deleterious effects of parental hostility on emerging adults’ positivity (Deane et al., 2019) were also built upon by the current results, which indicate that hostility in the parent-adolescent relationship may additionally impede young peoples’ engagement, future orientation, perseverance, and communication. As the impact of hostility was only apparent for young people who had not experienced any ACEs, it may be that hostility and ACEs share a large portion of variance in the risk for low positive development, and thus, the independent effect of hostility was only apparent in the absence of adversity. This may be due to the inter-relatedness of ACEs and hostility, in that some ACEs explicitly involve acts of hostility (e.g., emotional abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence), hostility is a risk factor for child maltreatment (Khoury et al., 2020), household dysfunction-type ACEs increase risk for hostility (Harold et al., 2012; Miller et al., 1999; Mulraney et al., 2019), and the level of hostility present within adverse experiences has been found to significantly contribute to their deleterious impact (Morgan et al., 2020). The current results therefore suggest a strong effect of hostility, whereby young people who experience ACEs (which may indicate hostility is present), or whose parent-adolescent relationship is highly hostile in the absence of ACEs, may be at significant risk for poor positive development. The criticism and strong negative emotionality in hostile parent-adolescent relationships may hinder positive development as young people are not taught to communicate in a healthy manner, and are discouraged from persevering through difficult tasks, expressing themselves or trying new things for fear of criticism or negative reactions. Through its effects on brain development, parental hostility may also impede young people’s ability to make future-related decisions (Chad-Friedman et al., 2021). It is therefore important that all families are supported to develop parent-adolescent relationships that are free from criticism and strong negative emotionality, in order to give young people the best chance to develop the positive aspects they need to thrive.

Another aspect of the parent-adolescent relationship explored in this study pertained to the connectedness (i.e., the presence of warmth and constructive communication) between parents and their adolescent children. While no significant link between connectedness and risk for poor positive development was observed in the current study, this may be in part due to the strong inverse relationship between adversity and connectedness observed in this sample, which mirrors the previously observed negative association between adversity and warmth (Holmes, 2013; Kimonis et al., 2013). A significant relationship between connectedness and positive development has however also been previously found (Chainey & Burke, 2021). The current lack of a significant link may therefore be in part due to elements of connectedness having differential associations with elements of positive development among different samples. For example, previous research has found that positive relationships can support young people’s perseverance in rural USA (Neppl et al., 2015), forward planning in Australia (Price-Robertson et al., 2010) and engagement in Lithuania (Kaniušonytė & Žukauskienė, 2017), while other studies have shown that parental warmth can negatively influence young peoples’ civic engagement in Finland (Pavlova et al., 2016), and may be ineffective in supporting self-esteem in the presence of strictness in Spain (Garcia & Serra, 2019). Future research may help to clarify what aspects of connectedness may best help support young people to thrive, cross-culturally and within Australia.

While it was additionally predicted that parenting would alter the effect of adversity, this prediction was not supported. In contrast, it was found that adversity and parental monitoring independently influence emerging adults’ ability to be engaged, communicative, future oriented, and resilient. Young people may therefore struggle to develop these qualities if they have experienced multiple adversities, regardless of the monitoring they received. This growth may also be hindered for young people who have not received supportive monitoring, either in the presence or absence of adversity. Young people may, however, be at even greater risk if they do not receive supportive monitoring in the context of adversity. Effective monitoring supports young people to develop the crucial skills and abilities needed for adulthood, and is particularly important for young people who have experienced maltreatment and dysfunction. The relationships observed in the current study are maintained when controlling for the effects of demographic characteristics of individuals, their households, and their areas of residence. In line with previous research (Bellis et al., 2014a, b; Burrus et al., 2012; Neppl et al., 2015) this indicates that although individuals with certain demographic characteristics (e.g., being younger, being male, living in a low SES area) may be at risk for poor outcomes, all young people may have a better chance at thriving if they experience fewer ACEs and more effective parenting. It is therefore critically important that all young people are supported to be engaged, resilient, communicative, and mindful of the future. Services and interventions aiming to reduce the prevalence of ACEs, support effective parenting, and help young people to thrive should be available for all.

Strengths and Limitations

The sample used in this paper comprised emerging adults with a wide range of demographic characteristics, which were generally represented in patterns similar to those seen in the general Australian population. The differences that were found between the sample and the general population indicate, however, that caution is required when comparing the results of this study to all Australian emerging adults. Future research may explore how parenting and adversity influence positive development in samples with greater representation of males, people with lower socioeconomic status, and people from Indigenous and non-English speaking families than is represented in the current paper. This is important because these demographic characteristics have previously been linked with higher risk for adversity and/or poor positive development (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2017; Bellis et al., 2014a, b; Bellis et al., 2014a, b; O’Connor et al., 2020; Soares et al., 2016; Steinberg et al., 2009). The current results may therefore underestimate the prevalence of these phenomenon, and the strength of their associations (Carlin, 2020).

The use of self-report cross-sectional data from one informant places additional limits to the interpretation of the results. Although responses were provided anonymously, it is possible that social desirability bias may have influenced respondents to under-report their experiences of adversity and hostility, and/or inflate their positive reports of parenting and current wellbeing. Retrospective recollection of adversity and parenting may have additionally contributed to inaccuracies in reporting, however extant evidence of this bias is mixed (Dube et al., 2004; Naicker et al., 2017). Having a single informant (i.e., not having parent-report or observer-report data) may have contributed to shared method variance, which could have inflated the strength of the observed associations (Rodríguez-Ardura & Meseguer-Artola, 2020). Young people and their parents may also have differing perspectives on their family’s adversity and parenting experiences (Naicker et al., 2017), which is not captured in the current paper’s single-respondent design. Lastly, the cross-sectional data collection precludes insights as to the direction of the relationships between adversity, parenting, and positive development. Additional studies should therefore be conducted with multiple informants and longitudinal data to investigate the trajectories, critical periods, and outcomes of the co-development and co-occurrence of adversity, parenting, and positive development over time. The development and evaluation of parenting interventions aiming to support young people’s positive development may help to guide how families can be supported, in the presence and the absence of adversity.

Conclusion

Young people who develop a well-rounded set of strengths around perseverance, planning, engagement, and communication may better travel through their current lives, and the transition into adulthood. Maltreatment and household dysfunctions can prevent young people from developing to their full potential, particularly where multiple types of adversity have accumulated. Although parenting may not undo the effects of adversity, supportive monitoring may foster positive development for young people, whether or not they have gone through adverse experiences. To help young people to thrive, families must be supported to prevent adversities and develop open lines of communication. Encouraging young people to be open and honest, without fear of criticism, can help them to be their best selves now and in the future, no matter their past.