Abstract
Objectives
Parents’ and youth’s personality qualities are associated with parent-child relationships. Given that gender shapes the organization and structure of family life, gender typed personality qualities may also have implications for relationships between parents and children. We examined longitudinal linkages between expressivity, a gender typed personality quality, and parent-child warmth and conflict in a sample of African American families and tested if parental stress moderated these associations.
Methods
Data came from mothers, fathers, and two adolescent-aged siblings (53% girls) from 185 families who participated in a three-year longitudinal study. In home interviews, parents and youth rated their own expressive qualities and perceptions of their relationship. Mothers and fathers also reported their family and work-related stress.
Results
Results from Actor-Partner Interdependence Models showed that youth’s expressivity positively predicted their own and their parents’ perceptions of relationship warmth and negatively predicted their own and their parents’ perceptions of conflict. Mothers’ expressivity positively predicted their own and youth’s perceptions of warmth and fathers’ expressivity positively predicted only their own perceptions of warmth. Parents’ expressivity was unrelated to conflict. Parental stress moderated the expressivity parent-youth relationship linkages differently for mothers and fathers. Youth’s expressivity more strongly predicted maternal warmth among mothers who experienced low versus high stress. Youth’s expressivity predicted lower conflict among fathers who experienced high stress.
Conclusions
Findings underscore the utility of moving beyond biological sex to examine the role of gender typed qualities in parent-child relationships during adolescence, as well as the contexts in which those processes are embedded.
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Data Availability
We continue to make our data available upon request, e.g., for meta-analyses. However, the sample is relatively small, from a circumscribed geographic region, and with several eligibility requirements given the larger study goals, raising concerns about deductive disclosure; relatedly, participants did not provide permission for their data to be shared beyond the study team. Including for these reasons, although this is an NIH-funded study, it did not meet criteria for public access.
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Authors’ Contributions
ODS: designed and executed the study, conducted the analyses, and wrote the manuscript; XS: provided guidance on data analysis and editing the final manuscript. SMM: designed the larger study and data collection and collaborated in interpreting the results and editing the final manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Pennsylvania State University and Wayne State University, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Skinner, O.D., Sun, X. & McHale, S.M. Longitudinal Links between Expressivity and African American Parent-Adolescent Relationships: A Dyadic Approach. J Child Fam Stud 29, 442–454 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01578-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01578-3