Sources of Parent-Adolescent Conflict: Content and Form of Parenting

Parent-adolescent conflicts are examined as a function of parental rule construction, use of reason at points of disagreement, and regulation of personal, moral, conventional, and prudential social domains. Multiple regression analyses of interviews with mothers, fathers, and adolescents revealed that, across all perspectives, variations in parental use of reason explain unique variance in conflict frequency above and beyond rule construction or regulation of domains. Furthermore, based on mothers' reports about their parenting and adolescents' reports of their mothers, the domains mothers regulate do not explain unique variance in conflict frequency but fathers' reports about their parenting and adolescents' reports of their fathers do. Differences in parents' and adolescents' perspectives are examined and it is concluded that content and form of parenting are both important in explaining conflict in differential ways between mother-adolescent and father-adolescent dyads.