Parent-Adolescent Communication

Time Spent Together

Psychological research has shown that, with increasing age, teenagers and parents in both the United States and Europe spend progressively less time in each other's company. Psychologists often have assessed the amount of time spent together by employing the “experience sampling method,” a daily diary method. Research participants carry pagers for 1 week, and when signaled at random intervals, they report on their location, activities, companions, experiences, and moods. Reed Larson and his colleagues have used this method in many studies and found that the amount of time adolescents spend with their family drops dramatically and steadily across adolescence, from about a third of their waking hours to only about 14 percent. Interestingly, at least in early to middle adolescence, the drop in time spent interacting with the family is because teenagers spend more time alone rather than out of the house. Moreover, there are age-related shifts in the types of activities families report. With age, they spend less time together watching TV and increased time talking together, particularly when siblings are present and more with mothers than with fathers. Family conversations increasingly focus on interpersonal topics, especially for girls. During the high school years, declines in amount of time spent together are partially due to other out-of-home opportunities and “pulls,” like jobs or having a driver's license. Thus, although the amount of family time spent together diminishes, there is more direct interaction with parents.

Negative Interactions and Adolescent-Parent Disagreements

Research using the experience sampling method also has shown that there are developmental changes in adolescents' daily emotional experiences within their families. Negative emotional states increase with age, and there are fewer extreme positive states, although the downward trend stops in late adolescence. Early adolescents' emotions are in flux, but there is increasing stability in their daily emotional experiences as they progress through adolescence. These findings parallel the results of both questionnaire studies and observations of family interactions, which typically find that negative interactions increase during adolescence. Across adolescence, girls report less negative affect, as measured on a daily basis, than do boys, but girls also report a wider range of daily variations than do boys in their positive and negative emotions. Also, across adolescence, increases in negative moods are strongly and consistently associated with increased daily stress.

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