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Parental Monitoring

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Encyclopedia of Adolescence

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Overview

Parental monitoring is associated with a variety of important outcomes for children and adolescents, such as delinquency, legal and illicit substance use, and school performance. This broad pattern of relations has been demonstrated cross-sectionally and longitudinally; it is generally robust across gender, (sub-)culture, reporter (e.g., adolescent-, parent-, or teacher-report), and socioeconomic status. Parental monitoring is not, however, a clearly defined, unitary construct. Rather it has been assessed in numerous ways, such as measures of parental knowledge and active parenting behaviors (e.g., parental solicitation of information, parental control of the child). Parental knowledge, which appears to stem largely from adolescent disclosure, seems to drive much of the monitoring-outcome associations, and this has led some researchers to call for a reconceptualization of the parental monitoring construct.

Parental Monitoring during Adolescence

Dishion and McMahon (1998)...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, N218 Elliott Hall, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Nicholas R. Eaton

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  1. Nicholas R. Eaton
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Correspondence to Nicholas R. Eaton .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, 302 Sycamore Hall, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Roger J. R. Levesque

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Eaton, N.R. (2011). Parental Monitoring. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_262

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