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Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/00/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0012-1649.36.3.366

Developmental Psychology 2000, Vol. 36, No. 3, 366-380

What Parents Know, How They Know It, and Several Forms of Adolescent Adjustment: Further Support for a Reinterpretation of Monitoring Margaret Kerr and Hakan Stattin Orebro University Parental monitoring has been conceptualized as tracking and surveillance but operationalized as knowledge of daily activities. This study tested the tracking and surveillance explanation of why parental knowledge is linked to better adolescent adjustment. Participants were 1,186 14-year-olds in central Sweden and their parents. The results supported and extended a reinterpretation of parental monitoring (H. Stattin & M. Kerr, in press). Across sex and informant, high parental knowledge was linked to multiple measures of good adjustment. But children's spontaneous disclosure of information explained more of these relations than parents' tracking and surveillance efforts did. Parents' control efforts were related to good adjustment only after the child's feelings of being controlled, which were linked to poor adjustment, were partialed out. The findings suggest that parents' tracking and surveillance efforts are not as effective as previously thought.

Life offers adolescents many opportunities for going astray. What can parents do to see that their adolescents avoid such opportunities? One of the answers that developmental research offers is that parents can be good monitors of their children's activities. A large body of research that has been conducted over the past 2 decades links high levels of parental monitoring with fewer adolescent behavior problems: less delinquency or antisocial behavior (Cerakovich & Giordano, 1987; Crouter, MacDermid, McHale, & Perry-Jenkins, 1990; McCord, 1986; Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984; Sampson & Laub, 1994; Weintraub & Gold, 1991), less illegal substance use (Flannery, Vazsonyi, Torquati, & Fridrich, 1994), less tobacco use (Biglan, Duncan, Ary, & Smolkowski, 1995), less risky sexual activity (Metzler, Noell, Biglan, Ary, & Smolkowski, 1994; Romer et al., 1994), better school performance (Crouter et al., 1990; White & Kaufman, 1997), and fewer deviant friends (Chassin, Pillow, Curran, Molina, & Barrera, 1993; Dishion, Capaldi, Spracklen, & Li, 1995). Clearly, monitoring is important.

review, for example, parental monitoring was defined as "a set of correlated parenting behaviors involving attention to and tracking of the child's whereabouts, activities, and adaptations" (Dishion & McMahon, 1998, p. 61). This assumption that monitoring is something that parents do can be seen in some of the conclusions that are drawn from monitoring studies to explain the links between monitoring and good adjustment in adolescents: Lack of parental monitoring . . . insures the possibility of numerous unpunished trials of... delinquent behavior (Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984, p. 1305); good supervision fosters appropriate parental reaction to antisocial and delinquent behaviors, and indirectly minimizes the adolescents' contact with delinquency-promoting circumstances, activities, and peers (Snyder & Patterson, 1987, p. 227); it may be plausibly inferred that monitoring affects boys' delinquency by preventing them from associating with [other delinquents], which may be a critical factor (Weintraub & Gold, 1991, p. 279); strong parental monitoring helps to deter adolescents from using alcohol and drugs themselves and. .. from associating with drug-using peers. (Fletcher, Darling, & Steinberg, 1995, p. 270)

What Is Monitoring? A recent study argues differently (Stattin & Kerr, in press). In that study we argued that parental action cannot be assumed in monitoring, because the measures that are most commonly used do not address what parents do, only what they know. Some items ask adolescents to rate their parents' knowledge of their school and free-time activities: "How much do your parents REALLY know?" (Fletcher et al., 1995, p. 262); "Do your parents know where you are? Do your parents know who you are with?" (Weintraub & Gold, 1991, p. 272); "My parents know who I'm with and where I am" (Cernkovich & Giordano, 1987, p. 303). In other studies, parents and children answer the same questions about the child's activities, and agreement between their answers is the measure of monitoring (Crouter et al., 1990; Crouter, Manke, & McHale, 1995; Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984). But none of these measures asks how parents got their information. Al-

The verb to monitor, meaning "to keep watch over or check as a means of control" (Read et al., 1995, p. 822), denotes deliberate action, and most conceptualizations of parental monitoring presume that parents are acting deliberately. In a recent

Margaret Kerr and Hakan Stattin, Department of Psychology, Orebro University, Orebro, Sweden. This research was supported by grants from the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Wenner-Grenska Samfundet. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Margaret Kerr, Department of Psychology, Orebro University, 701 82 Orebro, Sweden. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. 366

WHAT PARENTS KNOW

though the term monitoring denotes parental action, the measures tap knowledge only.1 How Do Parents Get Knowledge? Some scholars have suggested that if the child is not willing to share the information, parents' efforts cannot be effective (Crouter et al., 1990; Weintraub & Gold, 1991), and the above-mentioned study (Stattin & Kerr, in press) lends empirical support to that claim. Three potential sources of parental knowledge were identified, and they are also used in the present investigation. One was the child's free, willing disclosure of information. The other two represented parent-initiated efforts to actively track adolescents' whereabouts and activities. One, "parental solicitation," was conceptualized as gathering information about children's activities by asking the children themselves and talking with their friends and their friends' parents. The other, "parental control," was conceptualized as controlling adolescents' freedom to simply come and go as they please, without getting permission first or explaining afterward where they have been and what they have been doing. Taken together, these constructs capture much of what is meant by parental monitoring: "attention to and tracking of the child's whereabouts, activities, and adaptations" (Dishion & McMahon, 1998, p. 61). In our previously mentioned study (Stattin & Kerr, in press), child disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control were used to predict a measure of parental knowledge that was similar to the most commonly used "monitoring" measures. Child disclosure was, by far, the strongest predictor. Parental solicitation and control added little. Furthermore, when the three sources of information were used to predict the child's norm breaking, child disclosure was, again, the most important predictor. In other words, in spite of what the label implies, parental "monitoring" represented child disclosure of information more than parental tracking and surveillance, and child disclosure was the primary link to low norm-breaking. These findings suggest that the term monitoring is a misnomer if it is used to refer to parental knowledge measures, because the process by which parents get knowledge is more an activity of children than of parents. This casts a new light on parental "monitoring," its links to good adjustment, and the bidirectional processes within the family that encourage or discourage children to share their daily experiences. Reevaluating Parents' Tracking and Surveillance Efforts If it cannot be assumed that "monitoring" represents parents' tracking and surveillance efforts, then the relations between parents' efforts and adolescent adjustment must be studied directly. For example, on the basis of the evidence that youths become delinquent because of peer pressure (Fridrich & Flannery, 1995) and that they have more deviant friends when parental "monitoring" is low (Chassin et al., 1993; Dishion et al., 1995), it has been concluded that parents' tracking and surveillance efforts keep children from associating with peers who would be bad influences (Fletcher et al., 1995; Snyder & Patterson, 1987). But looking beyond the "monitoring" literature, there is evidence that parents' active efforts to control their adolescents' associations and activities are not effective (Cohen & Rice, 1995; Otto & Atkinson, 1997). In one study, parental tracking and surveillance of school

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work predicted lower, rather than higher, grades and test scores (Otto & Atkinson, 1997). In another study, an intervention that trained parents to exert more control over their children's access to alcohol and associations with substance-using peers was ineffective, even though parental knowledge of the child's whereabouts was associated with less substance use (Cohen & Rice, 1995). Apparently, parents' control efforts neither prevented substance use nor provided information about the child's whereabouts. In addition, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that vigilant tracking and surveillance might be linked to some forms of poor adjustment. Research has shown that the perception of personal control is important to people's physical and psychological health and well-being (Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988; Rodin, 1990; Rodin & Langer, 1977; Seligman, 1991; Syme, 1990). If people feel that they do not control thenown destinies, they can become depressed (Seligman, 1991) or physically ill (Peterson et al., 1988; Syme, 1990), and increasing the sense of personal control, even in small ways, might prolong life (Rodin & Langer, 1977). Why should personal control be any less important for adolescents' well-being? Consider the parental tracking strategy of controlling teenagers' freedom to come and go without getting permission or explaining their activities. Almost by definition, the more parents do this, the more controlled the child will feel. If parental control compromises the child's sense of personal control, then any benefits, such as reductions in antisocial behavior, could come at the cost of higher levels of depression, lower self-esteem, or doubts about their own abilities to succeed. This raises the related question how parents' active tracking efforts might affect the parent-child relationship. How do adolescents respond to parents' efforts to know what they are doing, where they are going, and whom they are with? Everyday experience suggests that adolescents might become resentful, rebellious, and, as a result, less emotionally warm and open with their parents. There has been some related speculation about the parenting factors associated with adolescent rebellion against their parents (the "generation gap") and society's values and standards. Some theorists claimed that adolescents should rebel against high parental control (Masters, 1970; Wolman, 1972-1973), whereas others claimed that low control or permissiveness should produce rebellion (Graff, 1970). In empirical studies, rebellion was linked with high control (Frankel & Dullaert, 1977; Kelly & Goodwin, 1983) and with a patriarchal family structure, regardless of the level of control (Balswick & Macrides, 1975). Adolescent hostility has also been linked to perceived parental control and higher levels of punishment (Amoroso & Ware, 1986). To our knowledge, however, there are no studies that have made the link between parents' tracking and surveillance and the quality of parent-child relationships. The present study tested the conclusions that have been drawn from the "monitoring" literature about parental tracking and surveillance. The present study extends our reinterpretation of monitoring (see Stattin & Kerr, in press). First, using an urban sample rather than a rural sample as we had in the other study, we replicated the findings concerning the basic relations between ' For conceptual clarity, in the remainder of this article we use quotation marks to distinguish parental knowledge measures—"monitoring"—from the tracking and surveillance construct—monitoring.

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parents' knowledge and three sources of information. Then, instead of restricting the study to one adjustment measure—norm breaking—as we had in the other study, we used multiple measures of internal adjustment, external adjustment, associations with deviant friends, and relationships with parents to examine the possible positive and negative effects that parents' efforts might have. We examined whether tracking seems to keep youths from becoming involved with deviant peers and engaging in delinquent behavior, as so often has been claimed; whether tracking and surveillance are linked to some forms of poor adjustment, such as lower self-esteem, more depressive symptoms, or poorer parentchild relationships; and whether parents' tracking and surveillance efforts provide a good explanation of the links between "monitoring" and adjustment. Finally, we present evidence to explain why one very reasonable sounding measure of parents' efforts, parental control, is not related to better adjustment—because control produces the feeling of being controlled, which is linked to poorer, rather than to better, adjustment.

were given as part of a larger questionnaire. For most of the scale measures used in this study, the individual items were intermingled throughout the questionnaire.

Method

Parents answered the same questions, with only minor changes in wording when necessary (e.g., "Do you: know what your child does during his or her free time? know who your child has as friends during his or her free time?"). Means were calculated for the child-report items (a = .85) and parent-report items (a — .82). The test-retest reliability for child-reported "monitoring" was substantial, r(36) = .83.

Participants Participants were 14-year-old youths and their parents in a mid-sized Swedish city. Students in all 8th-grade classes in the city (N = 1,283) composed the target sample for the study, which was the first wave of a longitudinal investigation. They took part in the study unless their parents returned a form stating that they did not want their child to participate (12 parents returned this form). Neither parents nor children were paid for their participation. Of the 1,283 students, 1,186 (92%) were present on the day of the data collection and answered the questionnaires. A questionnaire was sent to the home in which the child lived during the school week. It was addressed to the child's biological parent or legal guardian. Parents were asked to return the completed questionnaire by mail; 1,077 (84%) did so. In 73% of the cases, mothers filled out the questionnaire alone; in 18% of the cases, fathers filled it out alone; in 8% of the cases, mothers and fathers worked together; and in 1 % of the cases, a guardian other than a parent filled out the questionnaire.2 In Sweden, children have the same teacher for Grades 5-8, and the teachers get to know them quite well. At the end of the Grade 8 school term, the teachers were asked to fill out a brief questionnaire for each of these students. They were paid for their efforts. In all, 36 out of 55 teachers participated and returned ratings on 855 students (67% of the original target sample). During the planning phase of this study, one class of eighth graders from a neighboring community (N = 36) was recruited to fill out the questionnaire under the same conditions that the test sample would encounter (so that potential problems could be identified and solved). To gather reliability data, we returned to them 2 months later and administered the same questionnaire again. Those data were used to calculate the test-retest reliabilities reported in the present study. Because some measures were dropped and others were added after the pilot study, there are a few measures for which reliabilities have not been calculated. The pilot sample, which was from a small, relatively affluent community, was somewhat better adjusted and less variable than the large, urban sample used in the study; therefore, even though the test-retest correlations were substantial, they should be seen as conservative estimates.

Measures Most of the measures of parent-child communication and relationships that were used in this study were developed within this project and have been refined after several pilot investigations and another large study. They

What Parents Know: "Monitoring" In keeping with the monitoring literature, we operationalized the term monitoring as parents' knowledge of the child's whereabouts, activities, and associations. Using 5-point Likert scales, children answered nine questions about their parents' knowledge: Do your parents: know what you do during your free time? know who you have as friends during your free time? usually know what type of homework you have? know what you spend your money on? usually know when you have an exam or paper due at school? know how you do in different subjects at school? know where you go when you are out with friends at night? normally know where you go and what you do after school? In the last month, have your parents ever had no idea of where you were at night?

How They Know It: Sources of Parental Knowledge Three potential sources of information about adolescent's daily activities were considered: child disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control. Five items were used to measure each construct. Principal-components analyses of the 15 variables, reported separately for child- and parentreported measures, each showed three clear factors. As shown in Table 1, in both analyses the disclosure, solicitation, and control variables loaded on different factors. The loadings ranged from .56 to .82. All other loadings were less than .38. Child disclosure. This measure comprised five items. The children's questions were as follows: Do you talk at home about how you are doing in the different subjects in school? Do you usually tell how school was when you get home (how you did on different exams, your relationships with teachers, etc.)? Do you keep a lot of secrets from your parents about what you do during your free time? Do you hide a lot from your parents about what you do during nights and weekends? If you are out at night, when you get home, do you tell what you have done that evening? Parents answered the same questions, with only minor changes in wording when necessary. Five-point response scales were used. Alpha reliabilities were .80 for parents' reports and .78 for children's reports. The 2-month test-retest correlation for child-reported disclosure was .70 (df = 36). Parental solicitation. Five items were averaged to form the parental solicitation measure. The children's items were as follows:

2 Recent studies suggest that mothers and fathers can have different levels of knowledge under certain conditions (e.g., Crouter, HelmsErikson, Updegraff, & McHale, 1999). This is an important issue, but we did not address it in this study because we did not compare mothers and fathers in the same families. In our study, according to both parents' and children's reports, parental knowledge did not depend upon the sex of the parent who responded.

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Table 1 Factor Loadings for Variables That Measure Sources of Parental Knowledge Child disclosure Item

CR

PR

Parental solicitation

Parental control

CR

PR

CR

-.01 -.13 .38 .28 .24

.06 -.07 .24 .27 .16

.01 .07 .11 .19 .09

.03 .05 .07 .15 .02

.15 .16 .20 .12

.56 .64 .66 .67 .67

.58 .64 .64 .65 .70

-.06 .03 .16 .21 .33

-.05 -.02 .11 .18 .18

-.04 -.00 .08 .08 .17

.23 .06 -.03 .27 .07

.13 .11 .00 .06 .03

.69 .72 .69 .72 .74

.66 .66 .72 .77 .69

PR

Child disclosure items Child Child Child Child Child

keeps secrets about free time hides what happens nights & weekends tells what happens in school explains late night activities tells about school performance

.79 .82 .62 .64 .64

.74 .73 .72 .70 .75

Parental solicitation items Parents Parents Parents Parents Parents

talked with other parents last month talk to child's friends often initiate conversation about child's free time ask child what happens on average day ask child what happened during free time

.03 .14 .11 .14 .05

-.05

Parental control items Child Child Child Child Child Note.

must explain if out past curfew needs permission to be out late weeknights must ask before making Saturday night plans is required to explain all evening activities has to tell parent of Saturday night plans in advance

Children's reports (CR) and parents' reports (PR) were factor analyzed separately.

In the last month, have your parents talked with the parents of your friends? How often do your parents talk with your friends when they come to your home (ask what they do or what they think and feel about different things)? During the past month, how often have your parents started a conversation with you about your free time? How often do your parents initiate a conversation about things that happened during a normal day at school? Do your parents usually ask you to talk about things that happened during your free time (whom you met when you were out in the city, free time activities, etc.)? Parents answered the same questions, with slight changes in wording when necessary. The alpha reliabilities were .70 and .69 for youth-reported and parent-reported solicitation, respectively. Child-reported solicitation was highly reliable, according to the 2-month test-retest correlation, r(36) = .84. Parental control. This construct was measured with five items. Youths answered the following: Do you need to have your parents' permission to stay out late on a weekday evening? Do you need to ask your parents before you can decide with your friends what you will do on a Saturday evening? If you have been out very late one night, do your parents require that you explain what you did and whom you were with? Do your parents always require that you tell them where you are at night, who you are with, and what you do together? Before you go out on a Saturday night, do your parents require you to tell them where you are going and with whom? The scale ranged from 1 (no, never) to 5 (yes, always). Parents answered the same questions, with minor changes in wording. The alpha reliabilities were .78 and .75 for youths' reports and parents' reports, respectively. The 2-month test—retest reliability for child-reported parental control was high, K36) = .82.

-.09 .13 .14 .03 .21

Adolescent Adjustment Delinquency. Youths answered 15 questions about whether they had engaged in certain behaviors during the past year. The response scale ranged from 1 (never) to 5 (more than 10 times). The questions were about shoplifting, being caught by the police for something they had done, vandalizing public or private property, taking money from home, creating graffiti, breaking into a building, stealing from someone's pocket or bag, buying or selling stolen goods, stealing a bike, being in a physical fight in public, carrying a weapon, stealing a car, stealing a moped or a motorcycle, using marijuana or hashish, and using other drugs. Parents answered the same questions about what their youths had done, according to their knowledge. The correlation between parent- and youth-reported delinquency was .43 (df = 983). School problems. Ratings from three different informants were used. The youths' and their parents' judgments focused on attitudes toward school; the teachers' judgments included performance in different subjects and problem behavior in school as well. The teachers' judgments correlated significantly with both parents' and youths' judgments, r(695) = .45, p < .001, and r(112) — .41, p < .001, respectively. The correlation between parents' and children's judgments was substantial, r(977) = .57, p < .001. Children used 5-point Likert scales to answer five questions (the anchors of the scales are given in parentheses): Do you enjoy school? (a lot to not at all); Do you try to do the best that you can in school? (mostly to almost never); Do you feel that you are forced to be at school against your will? (almost never to very often); How would you describe the relationship between you and school? (like best friends to like enemies); Are you satisfied with your school work? (mostly to almost never). Some items were reversed so that higher scores indicated more problems. The alpha reliability for this scale was .80. The test-retest correlation was

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.78 (df = 36). Parents answered similar questions about their children (e.g., "Does your child enjoy school?" "Does your child try to do his or her best at school?"). The alpha reliability for this scale was .83. Teacher-rated school problems comprised 10 items taken from various instruments that the teachers filled out. The items, which were standardized (z scores) and averaged to form the composite measure, were as follows: How well does the student perform in comparison with others in your class? What grade did the student receive in Swedish/English/Mathematics? [3 questions] How often do you see that a student very much engages in and shows a burning interest in a subject? How would you describe the relationship between the student and school? Is [the student] concerned with how well he/she does at school or work? Ratings were made on 7-point scales anchored with never gets in trouble in school to always gets in trouble in school; very good at spelling to not good at spelling; and very good at math to not good at math. The alpha reliability for this scale was .92. Poor teacher relations. Children answered seven questions about their relationships with their teachers, again using 5-point scales. The questions were as follows: Do you like your teachers? Do you feel bored with your teachers? Do you think that your teachers are fair with you? Do you think that your teachers like you as a student? Do you think that your teachers understand you? Do you usually say something against your teachers? If you have a problem at school, do you feel as if you could go to your teachers about it? The alpha reliability for this scale was .85. Depressed mood. As the measure of depressed mood, a self-report questionnaire, the Child Depression Scale from the Center for Epidemiological Studies, was used (Roberts, Lewinsohn, & Seeley, 1991; Schoenbach, Kaplan, Grimson, & Wagner, 1982; Weissman, Sholomskas, Pottenger, Prusoff, & Locke, 1977). Children answered 20 questions about their mood during the last week (e.g., "During the last week I have: been bothered by things I am usually not bothered by; felt that I am not as good as everybody else; felt depressed and unhappy; felt like I wanted to cry; felt sad"). In the present sample, the alpha reliability for this scale was .88. Low self-esteem. Ten items from the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1979) were used as the measure of self-esteem: For the most part, are you satisfied with yourself? Sometimes, do you think that you are no use to anyone? Do you think that you have many good qualities? Are you able to do things as well as others? Do you think that you have a lot to be proud about? Do you occasionally feel really incompetent? Do you feel as if you are worth a lot, at least as much as everyone else? Do you wish that you could have better opinions about yourself? For the most part, do you easily feel like a failure? For the most part, do you see yourself positively? The items were reversed, when necessary, so that high scores indicated low self-esteem. The alpha reliability for this scale was .88. The test-retest correlation was .78. Failure expectations. Youths and parents reported on the child's expectations of failure, a construct that is related to self-esteem but not synonymous with it (Nurmi, 1993; Nurmi, Onatsu, & Haavisto, 1995; Nurmi, Salmela-Aro, & Ruotsalainen, 1994). Youths answered six questions: I do not really have confidence in my own abilities to do well with difficult tasks; I quickly become uncertain when I am given new tasks; I often think it is not even worth trying when I am confronted with a difficult problem; I think for the most part that I will do well at things, even if they are difficult; I think that difficult problems and assign-

ments are fun; Since I feel that I have a hard time dealing with things, I usually do worse in school than I could have done. Parents answered similar questions about the youths (e.g., "He/she doesn't really have confidence in his/her own abilities to do well with difficult tasks," "He/she quickly becomes uncertain when given new tasks," "He/ she often thinks that it is not even worth trying when confronted with difficult tasks"). The alpha reliabilities for youths' and parents' reports were .75 and .84, respectively. The correlation between parents' and youths' reports was substantial, r(1164) = .55, p < .001. Deviant friends. The children were asked a number of questions about the different peer groups at school. As part of this questionnaire, they listed the different "groups of teens that hang out together," starting with the group to which they themselves belonged (Cairns & Cairns, 1994; Cairns, Gariepy, & Kinderman, 1987; Gest & Cairns, 1989). Then they answered the following questions about their own friends. "In the group that you belong to, how many people (that you know of): often hang out on the streets in the evening; have had problems with the police at some time?" Their scores on these items represented the number of their close friends whom the item described. Poor relations with mother or father. Children answered eight questions about their relationships with their mothers. The response options ranged from 1 (almost never) to 5 (very often). The questions were as follows: Do you and your mother quarrel and fight with each other? How often do you feel disappointed with your mother? How often do you feel proud of your mother? [reversed], How well do you think that you and your mother understand each other? [reversed], Do you wish that your mother was different? Do you accept your mother the way she is? [reversed], Does your mother usually support and encourage you? [reversed], How often do you feel angry or irritated by your mother? The scale had an alpha reliability of .85 and a test-retest correlation of .69. The same questions were asked about fathers. That scale had an alpha reliability of .82 and a test-retest correlation of .82. Feeling controlled. The children reported on how controlled by their parents they felt. The items included the following: Do you think that you get enough freedom from your parents to do what you want in your free time? [reversed] Do you feel that your parents demand to know everything? Do you feel as though your parents control everything in your life? Do you feel as though you can't keep anything to yourself because your parents want to know everything? Do you think that your parents interfere too much in your free time activities? The response options ranged from 1 (yes, always) to 5 (no, never). The alpha reliability for this scale was .82, and the test-retest correlation was .65.

Procedure The adolescents filled out the questionnaires during regular school hours, and they were assured of the confidentiality of their answers. They were informed that their parents would answer similar questions. Research assistants administered the questionnaires. Teachers were not present. Parents responded by filling out and mailing in a questionnaire. They were informed that their children had answered similar questions at school.

Analyses Correlational and multiple regression strategies were used to show the relations between adolescent adjustment measures on the one hand and "monitoring" and three sources of parents' knowledge on the other. Be-

WHAT PARENTS KNOW

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Table 2 Mean Scores and Standard Deviations as a Function of Gender for All Measures Boys Item

M

Girls SD

M

SD

t

df

Parents' knowledge and sources of knowledge Parental "monitoring" CR PR Child disclosure CR PR Parental solicitation CR PR Parental control CR PR

-0.09 -0.06

0.70 0.67

0.07 0.06

0.65 0.61

-4.2** -3.2*

1171 1004

-0.12 -0.13

0.70 0.76

0.11 0.11

0.74 0.70

-5.4** -5.3**

1158 1006

-0.11 -0.03

0.67 0.69

0.09 0.02

0.67 0.65

-5.3** -1.2

1163 1058

-0.13 -0.06

0.72 0.74

0.11 0.07

0.72 0.66

-5.6** -3.0*

1148 973

External maladjustment Delinquency CR PR School problems CR PR TR Poor teacher relations: CR

0.14 0.07

0.79 0.54

-0.11 -0.06

0.33 0.33

7.0** 4.7**

702 790

0.07 0.15 0.16 0.03

0.76 0.71 0.72 0.74

-0.05 -0.17 -0.17 -0.02

0.73 0.76 0.75 0.70

3.0* 3.7** 6.3** 1.3

1164 989 830 1165

Internal maladjustment Depressive symptoms: CR Low self-esteem: CR Failure expectations CR PR

-0.13 -0.13

0.48 0.65

0.11 0.11

0.60 0.70

-7.6** -5.9**

1168 1098

-0.07 0.06

0.64 0.74

0.07 -0.05

0.69 0.75

-3.6** 2.3

1152 1051

2.17 1.04

1.5 4.3**

773 492

0.08 0.08

0.77 0.76

-4.1** -4.8**

1148 1117

-0.04

0.75

2.3

1166

Friends' deviance Hang out on streets: CR Caught by police: CR

1.73 0.92

2.12 1.59

1.5 0.48

Poor parent-child relationships With mother: CR With father: CR

-0.09 -0.12

0.65 0.69 Feeling controlled

CR

0.05

0.65

Note. The term "monitoring" refers to parental knowledge measures. Means are standardized (z) scores, except for friends' measures, which indicate the number of friends. CR = children's reports; PR = parents' reports; TR = teachers' reports. * p < . 0 1 . **p<.001.

cause many relations are reported and the sample size is large, a significance cutoff of .01 was used. In addition, for consistency and ease of interpreting the tables, higher scores on the adjustment variables always mean poorer adjustment.

Results Gender Differences Gender is included to show that the basic relations between parents' knowledge, sources of knowledge, and adolescent adjustment are similar for boys and girls. This issue arises because

gender differences in some aspects of parents' communication and control, particularly of younger children, appear in the literature (e.g., Leaper, Anderson, & Sanders, 1998; Lytton & Rornney, 1991; Pomerantz & Ruble, 1998). As reported in Table 2, gender differences also appeared for many measures used here. Boys scored higher on externalizing problems (delinquency, school problems) and peer deviance, and girls scored higher on internalizing problems (depressive symptoms, low self-esteem). Girls also scored higher on almost all measures of parents' knowledge and sources of knowledge, and they also reported poorer relationships with their parents than boys did. Despite these mean-level differ-

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Table 3 Bivariate Correlations Between Parental Knowledge ("Monitoring") and Adolescent Adjustment Measures Child-reported "monitoring" Measure External maladjustment Delinquency PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Friends' characteristics Hang out on streets Have been caught by police Family discord Bad mother relations Bad father relations

Parent-reported "monitoring"

Total

Boys

Girls

Total

Boys

Girls

-.45** -.24** -.46** -.28** -.28** -.48**

-.44** -.26** -.47** -.28** -.27** -.49**

-.52** -.19** -.44** -.27** -.25** -.46**

-.30** -.39** -.28** -.41** -.32** -.30**

-.30** _44** -.34** -.44** -.36** -.34**

-.28** -.33** -.20** -.36** -.28** -.25**

-.24** -.24** -.25** -.17**

-.26** -.27** -.14* -.14*

-.29** -.27** -.18** -.18**

-.15** -.18** -.22** -.33**

-.18** -.19** -.24** -.33**

-.19** -.21* -.22** -.31**

-.29** -.28**

-.25** -.24**

-.31** -.31**

-.20** -.22**

-.19* -.24**

-.20** -.18**

-.48** -.41**

-.47** -.42**

-.52** -.45**

-.28** -.23**

-.32** -.28**

-.29** -.22**

Note. All adjustment measures are adolescents' self-reports unless otherwise indicated. PR = parents' reports; TR = teachers' reports. *p<.01. **p<.001.

ences, however, the pattern of findings is the same for both genders. Because of space constraints, separate results for boys and girls are presented only for some key results.

Relations Between Parents' Knowledge and Adjustment, Broadly Defined First, it is necessary to establish that "monitoring" is linked to good adjustment, broadly defined. Table 3 shows that, as in previous studies, "monitoring" correlates negatively with poor external adjustment and having undesirable friends. Table 3 extends previous "monitoring" findings by showing that "monitoring" correlates with internal adjustment and relationships with parents. It is important to note that for many of these relations, the data are from

Table 4 Intercorrelations Among "Monitoring " (Parents' Knowledge) and Three Sources of Knowledge Measure 1. Child disclosure 2. Parental solicitation 3. Parental control 4. Parental "monitoring"

1

2

3

4

.41** (970) .33** (1156) .28** (1148) .70** (1156)

.36** (1060) .33** (977) .37** (1146) .23** (1161)

.17** (1049) .22** (1044) .29** (967) .32** (1146)

.64** (1063) .46** (1066) .26** (1047) .43** (986)

Note. Degrees of freedom are in parentheses. Parents' reports are above and children's reports are below the diagonal. Correlations between parents' and children's reports on the diagonal are in boldface. **p < .001.

two different informants (i.e., those marked PR [parents' reports] or TR [teachers' reports] in the left portion of the table and all except those marked PR in the right portion). These correlations are somewhat lower in magnitude, but the same relations appear. Table 3 also shows that the same conclusion—higher levels of "monitoring" are linked with better adjustment, broadly defined— holds for both boys and girls. This is true despite the fact that there are mean-level differences between boys and girls on many of these measures. Regardless of rater, the particular form of adjustment, or the child's gender, then, higher levels of parental knowledge ("monitoring") are related to better adjustment.

Do Tracking and Surveillance Provide Knowledge? To examine how parents' efforts to gain information are related to knowledge, we computed correlations between "monitoring" and the sources of knowledge; these correlations appear in Table 4. Intercorrelations among parent-rated measures are above the diagonal, intercorrelations among child-rated measures are below the diagonal, and correlations between parent- and child-reported measures are on the diagonal. For both parents' and children's reports, parent-initiated efforts were less strongly linked to "monitoring" than was child disclosure (Z = 12.82, p < .001, for parental control vs. child disclosure, children's ratings; Z = 6.01, p < .001, for parental solicitation vs. child disclosure, parents' ratings). These findings replicated those in our other study (Stattin & Kerr, in press). For children's ratings, parental solicitation and control did not differ significantly in their correlations with "monitoring" (Z = 2.35, p > .01). For parents' ratings, parental solicitation correlated more highly with "monitoring" than parental control did (Z = 5.30, p < .001). It should be noted that the same pattern of relations was found when parent-reported "monitoring" was cor-

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WHAT PARENTS KNOW

related with child-reported sources, r(977) = .35, p < .001, K980) = .13, p < .001, and K970) = .12, p < .001, for child disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control, respectively, and when child-reported "monitoring" was correlated with parentreported sources, r(919) = .36, p < .001, r(983) = .14, p < .001, and H963) = .09, p < .01, for child disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control, respectively. Judging from these correlations, then, parent-initiated tracking and surveillance efforts are less important than the child's free, willing disclosure in providing information.

Do Tracking and Surveillance Promote Good Adolescent Adjustment? Are parents' efforts directly related to adjustment, broadly defined? To answer this, we looked at correlations between the three sources of information and the adjustment measures. As shown in Table 5, there are some instances in which parental control or solicitation are significantly correlated with better adolescent adjustment. However, for nearly every measure of adjustment, parents' control and solicitation are significantly less strongly correlated with adjustment than child disclosure is. Higher child-rated parental control and/or solicitation tend to be related to less delinquency, fewer school problems, and better relations with teachers, but child disclosure is more strongly linked to these measures. Child disclosure is also the strongest link to fewer depressive symptoms, better self-esteem, and better relations with both parents, especially mothers. Even for having fewer deviant friends, where parents' efforts are thought to be so beneficial, child disclosure is clearly the strongest link. There is little evidence that parents' tracking and surveillance efforts keep adolescents away from deviant peers, even when parents' own reports of their

solicitation and control efforts are used (see the right portion of Table 5). However, because these information sources are all correlated with each other, bivariate correlations are not good estimates of their unique relations to adjustment. To uncover their unique contributions, we entered the three information sources simultaneously into regression models predicting each of the adjustment measures. These results, reported separately for girls and boys, appear in Table 6. Across adjustment measures, gender, and informant, control and solicitation made relatively unimportant unique contributions to the prediction of adjustment. Furthermore, they were sometimes significantly linked to poorer, rather than better, adjustment. Child disclosure, in contrast, was always linked to better adjustment, and all but one of these relations were significant. There is no direct evidence, then, to link parents' tracking efforts with good adolescent adjustment in a broad, general way.

Do Tracking and Surveillance Explain Why "Monitoring" Is Linked to Adjustment? The final step in testing the assumptions that have been made about why "monitoring" is related to good adjustment is to determine whether parents' tracking and surveillance efforts provide a good explanation for the links between "monitoring" and adjustment, as the monitoring literature claims. Following a regression procedure used by Frame and Eccles (1998), we predicted each adjustment measure from "monitoring" on a first step and from "monitoring" and one of the sources of information on a second step. Of interest was whether controlling for a particular source of information would significantly reduce the relation between "monitoring" and adjustment (i.e., move the slope out of the 95%

Table 5 Bivariate Correlations Linking Three Sources of Parental Information With Adolescent Adjustment Child-reported sources Measure External maladjustment Delinquency PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Have been caught by police Family discord Bad mother relations Bad father relations

Child disclosure

Parental solicitation

Parental control

-.37** -.17** -.48** -.31** -.33** -.47**

.00 -.01 -.17** -.08* -.18** -.13**

-.12** -.08* -.18** -.09* -.13** -.18**

-.27** -.31** -.31** -.24**

-.03 -.11** -.14** -.11*

-.28** -.25** -.52** -.39**

Parent-reported sources Child disclosure

Parental solicitation

Parental control

Za

6.5** 1.9 8.2** 5.0** 3.2** 7.9**

-.24** -.32** -.25** -.39** -.25** -.27**

.04 -.11** -.04 -.13** -.12* -.07

-.05 -.13** -.02 -.08 -.06 -.01

4.3** 4.7** 4.8** 6.2** 2.6* 4.6**

-.03 -.02 -.02 -.06

6.0** 5.0** 4.3** 3.0*

-.09* -.13** -.15** -.32**

-.08* -.07 -.11* -.13**

-.01 -.04 -.00 -.00

0.2 1.3 1.0 4.7**

-.01 -.00

-.05 -.08

4.7** 3.4**

-.21** -.21**

-.04 -.03

-.07 -.04

2.6* 3.1*

-.12** -.10*

-.04 -.11**

10.9** 7.1**

-.28** -.21**

-.11* -.10*

-.04 -.05

3.9** 2.5

Za

Note. All adjustment measures are adolescents' self-reports unless otherwise indicated. PR = parents' reports; TR = teachers' reports. a Difference between child disclosure and the next largest correlation (Fisher's R to Z). * / > < .01. **/><.001.

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Table 6

Beta Slopes From Multiple Regression Models Predicting Adjustment From Three Sources of Parental Information Boys

Girls

Measure

Child disclosure

Parental solicitatior i

Parental control

Model R

Child disclosure

Parental solicitation

Parental control

Model R

-.05 -.04 -.06 -.04 .04 -.07

.51 .20 .49 .25 .24 .46

.06 .01 .07 -.02

.37 .37 .34 .17

Child-reported sources External maladjustment Delinquency

PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Have been caught by police Family discord Poor mother relations Poor father relations

-.38** -.14* -.47** -.35** -.33** -.48**

.17* .02 .01 .01 -.11 .06

-.28** -.34** -.32** -.29**

-.01 -.06 -.11* -.07

-.24** -.31**

.13 .16

-.53** -.42**

-.04 -.00

-.05 -.05 -.04 .00 .02 -.07

.36 .15 .48 .35 .37 .49

-.52** -.20** -.48** -.26** -.21** -.46**

.27 .34 .35 .31

-.38** -.35** -.35** -.17*

-.00 .04

.22 .28

-.32** -.33**

.13* .12

-.06 -.05

.32 .33

.09 .01

.51 .42

-.60** -.43**

.03 .03

.08 -.07

.59 .44

.10 .14* .08 .04

.22** .15* .01 .10 .01 .04 .03 -.05 -.04 .02

Parent-reported sources External maladjustment Delinquency PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Have been caught by police Family discord Poor mother relations Poor father relations

-.22** -.24** -.29** -.32** -.24** -.29**

.05 -.04 .10 -.04 -.06 .08

-.01 -.09 -.02 -.00 .10 .00

.21 .29 .27 .33 .26 .27

-.25** -.34** -.22** -.43** -.19* -.26**

.05 .05 .02 .06 .02 -.01

.03 -.08 .06 -.03 -.10 .06

.24 .34 .21 .41 .22 .26

-.10 -.17* -.13* -.28**

.00 .04 -.12* -.07

-.00 -.10 .12* .04

.09 .20 .21 .30

-.15* -.15* -.20** -.33**

-.08 -.05 .05 .02

.05 .04 -.07 .06

.19 .17 .21 .33

-.25** -.18*

.02 .02

.04 -.01

.24 .18

-.14* -.23**

.07 .08

-.05 -.06

.14 .23

-.39** -.28**

.07 .04

.11 .02

.37 .27

-.28** -.17**

-.08 -.09

.07 -.05

.31 .23

Note. All adjustment measures are adolescents' self-reports unless otherwise indicated. PR *p < .01. **p < .001.

confidence interval). As shown in Table 7, there is no single instance in which controlling for parental solicitation or parental control creates a significant change in a relation between "monitoring" and adjustment. In contrast, there are few instances in which controlling for child disclosure does not significantly change the "monitoring" slope. In some cases, "monitoring" becomes nonsignificant when child disclosure is added.

Why Does Parental Control Not Work? Parental control, defined in various ways, has been widely considered a vital strategy for parents of adolescents. Consider the items that make up the present parental control measure—requiring children to get permission to stay out late on weekday eve-

parents' reports; TR = teachers' reports.

nings, to tell of their Saturday night plans in advance, to tell where they have been in the evening and with whom, and, if they have been out past curfew, to explain why. These sound like reasonable strategies. However, the correlations between control and adjustment are less than impressive, as seen in Table 5. How could such strategies not be related to good adolescent adjustment? We argue that this is because higher levels of parental control are related to greater feelings of being controlled on the part of adolescents, and feelings of being controlled are linked to poorer, not better, adjustment. The present data bear this out. The higher the level of parental control that the children reported, the more they tended to feel controlled, r(\ 148) = .34, p < .001. This is also somewhat true for parents' reports of control, r(959) = .14, p <

WHAT PARENTS KNOW

\

375

Table 7 Tests of Sources of Parental Information as Explanations of the Relations Between "Monitoring" and Adolescent Adjustment Step 1 "monitoring" ("M")

Measure

B

CI

Step 2 B "M"

Child disclosure

Step 2 B

Step 2 B

"M"

Parental solicitation

"M"

Parental control

Child-reported "monitoring" and sources External maladjustment Delinquency Delinquency (PR) School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Been caught by police Family discord Bad mother relations Bad father relations

-.38 -.15 -.51 -.32 -.32 -.51

-.43 -.18 -.57 -.39 -.40 -.57

to-.34 to-.11 to-.45 to-.25 to-.25 to - . 4 6

-.32 -.15 -.27 -.15 -.13 -.31

-.08 .00 -.32 -.23 -.26 -.26

-.42 -.15 -.49 -31 -.29 -.50

.10 .03 -.08 -.02 -.13 -.02

-.39 -.14 -.50 -.32 -.30 -.50

.01 -.00 -.04 -.00 .04 -.03

-.20 -.25 -.25 -.18

-.24 -.31 -.30 -.25

to to to to

-.15 -.19 -.19 -.12

-.07 -.05 -.06 .01

-.16 -.26 -.25 -.26

-.21 -.24 -.23 -.17

.03 -.05 -.09 -.08

-.23 -.27 -.27 -.18

.09 .07 .06 -.01

-.95 -.56

-1.2 t o - . 7 3 - . 7 0 to - . 4 2

-.62 -.41

-.42 -.21

-1.0 -.59

.31 .15

-.99 -.56

-.14 .00

-.51 -.45

- . 5 7 to - . 4 6 - . 5 1 to - . 3 9

-.24 -.30

-.37 -.21

-.51 -.45

.01 .01

-.56 -.46

.12

Parent-reported "monitoring" and sources External maladjustment Delinquency PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Been caught by police Family discord Bad mother relations Bad father relations

-.26 -.27 -.33 -.49 -37 -.35

-.31 -.31 -.40 -.56 -.45 -.41

to - . 2 1 to - . 2 3 to-.26 to - . 4 3 to - . 2 9 to - . 2 8

-.21 -.22 -.23 -.33 -JO -.25

-.07 .07 -.13 -.23 -.09 -.13

-.29 -.29 -.36 -.51 -.38 -.37

.07 .04 .09 .05 .06 .06

-.27 -.27 -.34 -.50 -.36 -.36

.03 -.02 .06 .03 .02 .07

-.13 -.19 -.22 -.38

-.18 -.26 -.29 -.45

to - . 0 7 to - . 1 2 to - . 1 6 to-.31

-.12 -.16 -.20 -.24

-.00 -.04 -.03 -.19

-.12 -.20 -.22 -.38

.03 -.00 -.03 .00

-.14 -.19 -.24 -.40

.04 .00 .06 .08

-.71 -.46

-.97 to-.45 -.62 t o - . 3 1

-.42 -.33

-.38 -.18

-.76 -.52

.18 .14

-.70 -.49

-.07 .04

-.31 -.26

- . 3 8 to - . 2 5 -.34 to-.19

-.19 -.19

-.17 -.11

-.32 -.26

-.00 -.02

-.36 -.27

.12 -.01

Note. The term "monitoring" ("M") refers to parental knowledge measures. All adjustment measures are adolescents' self-reports unless otherwise indicated. There was a 95% confidence interval (CI) for the unstandardized slope (B). PR = parent rated; TR = teacher rated. For numbers in boldface, p < .01.

.001. Feeling controlled, in turn, is related to every measure of poor adjustment (rs range from . 14 for having friends who hang out on the streets in the evening to .43 for bad mother relations, all ps < .001). In regression terms, one cannot get an unbiased estimate of the relations between parental control and adolescent adjustment without adjusting for feeling controlled, which is correlated with both the predictor and the criterion measures. The relations between parental control and each of the adjustment measures after adjusting for the child's feelings of being controlled are shown in Table 8. The beta slopes for feeling controlled, entered simultaneously, are also included in the table. When children's reports of parental control are considered, after adjusting for the fact that feeling controlled is increasing along with parental control efforts, these reasonable-sounding parental

control strategies correspond to better adjustment on all measures except depression. In contrast, feeling controlled is independently linked to poor adjustment on every measure. (There are no significant interactions between parental control and feeling controlled in any of these models.) For parents' reports of control, most of the links to adolescent adjustment remain nonsignificant, even after adjusting for feeling controlled. It should be noted that a more realistic view would account for the fact that parental control correlates with child disclosure and parental solicitation, as well as with feeling controlled. When these covariates are added, the only significant relations between parental control and adjustment are for the external adjustment measures, and, although statistically significant, they are all low in magnitude, j3 = -.0&,p = .01,(3 = - . 1 0 , p < .01, and/3 = - . 1 1 ,

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Table 8 Beta Slopes From Multiple Regression Models Predicting Adjustment From Parental Control and Children's Feelings of Being Controlled (Entered Simultaneously) Parent reported

Child reported

Measure External maladjustment Delinquency PR School problems PR TR Poor teacher relations Internal maladjustment Depressed mood Low self-esteem Failure expectations PR Deviant friends Hang out on streets Have been caught by police Family discord Poor mother relations Poor father relations

Parental control

Feeling controlled

Parental control

Feeling controlled

-.20** -.12** -.28** -.16** -.19** -.28**

.22** .11* .30** .20** .19** .31**

-.07 -.12** -.05 -.11** -.07 -.04

.15** .08* .21** .16** .15** .21**

-.04 -.10* -.10* -.12**

.21** .25** 22** .18**

-.12 -.07 -.03 -.02

.21** .25** .20** .13**

-.11* -.15**

.18** .21**

-.09 -.06

.14** .15**

-.20** -.21**

.50** .30**

-.03 -.08*

.45** .25**

Note. All adjustment measures are adolescents' self-reports unless otherwise indicated. PR = parents' reports; TR = teachers' reports. *p < .01. **p < .001.

p < .001, for child-reported delinquency, school problems, and poor teacher relations, respectively. In the broader picture, then, parental control is a relatively poor predictor, even after controlling for feeling controlled. Discussion Studies of parental "monitoring" have shown repeatedly that children's and parents' judgments of how much parents know about their adolescents' daily activities are related to measures of good external adjustment and fewer deviant friends. This study replicated those findings and extended them by showing that both parents' and children's estimates of how much parents know about their adolescents' daily activities were also related to measures of internal adjustment and relationships with parents. How should findings such as these be understood? Studies in the monitoring literature usually interpret them as evidence that parental tracking and surveillance strategies are effective in preventing adolescents from becoming involved with deviant peers and in delinquent behavior, the assumption being that if parents have knowledge, it is because they took active steps to get it. This study tested that interpretation and found no evidence for it. As in our other recent study (Stattin & Kerr, in press), the present study demonstrated that from parents' and children's points of view, child disclosure of information provided a better explanation than tracking and surveillance measures (parental solicitation and control) of how parents get knowledge. The present study extends the findings of our other study (Stattin & Kerr, in press) by showing that child disclosure of information was more strongly linked to adjustment than were measures of parents' tracking efforts, and child disclosure provided a better explanation

than tracking and surveillance of why parental knowledge is linked to adjustment. These results held for parents' and children's judgments of what parents knew and how they knew it, in most cases even when parents' judgments of these variables were compared with children's judgments of adjustment. The use of parents' and children's views of parent-child interactions was a particular strength of the study. Although others have argued that children's views provide the most important or accurate glimpse into family interactions (Glasgow, Dornbusch, Troyer, Steinberg, & Ritter, 1997; Niemi, 1974), and although parents' and children's views sometimes show little consensus (W. A. Collins, 1990; Smetana, 1988), this study included both and found that the same conclusions could be drawn from either informants' reports or from a combination of the two. From these results, it cannot be concluded that, in the normal socialization process, parental tracking and surveillance prevents children from interacting with deviant peers who draw them into delinquency, as scholars often have assumed (Chassin et al., 1993; Dishion et al., 1995; Fletcher et al., 1995; Snyder & Patterson, 1987). On the contrary, with child disclosure and parental control held constant, one tracking measure, parental solicitation, was somewhat associated with a greater likelihood of delinquency and, for boys, with having deviant friends. But these results should not be overinterpreted because of their low strengths and because we do not know the direction of causality. For the strongest of these relations—the links between child-reported parental solicitation and child-reported delinquency—solicitation might have been a reactive strategy used by parents who already knew that their children were breaking the law. Or, alternatively, the children might have perceived their parents' solicitation efforts as overly

WHAT PARENTS KNOW controlling and intrusive and reacted by turning to a delinquent peer culture that their parents could not penetrate or control. This study suggests further that controlling adolescents' freedom to come and go as they please is a questionable strategy for keeping abreast of what they are doing and promoting good adjustment, broadly defined. This is because with higher levels of parental control, adolescents had stronger feelings of being controlled, which, in turn, were linked with greater depressive symptoms, poorer self-esteem, and more expectations of failure, just as the lack of perceived personal control is in adults (Seligman, 1991). In fact, feelings of being controlled were related to poor adjustment in a broad, general way. Because feelings of being controlled accompany higher levels of parental control, the practical consideration for parents might be finding a way to control without producing feelings of being controlled. But even with feeling controlled partialed out, parental control was rather weakly related to adjustment. On the whole, then, there is not much in these results to recommend parental control as a strategy. Given the theoretical and practical implications of these conclusions, it is important to ask how well these measures really represent parental tracking and surveillance—that is, do they provide a fair test of parents' tracking efforts? In our view, parents might keep track of their children's whereabouts and activities in a variety of ways: by requiring the children (a) to describe where they intend to go and with whom; (b) to get permission before going out, both on school nights and on weekends; and (c) if they violate curfew, to explain where they have been, what they have been doing, and with whom. Parents might also attend to and track their children's whereabouts and activities by regularly asking them about their school and leisure-time experiences, keeping in touch with the parents of their children's friends so that they can be used as a source of information and asking their children's friends how they think and feel about various issues in order to understand what influences their children are encountering. All these were included in our measures of parental solicitation and control, and, although there might be other means of tracking a child's whereabouts and activities, we argue that these offer a fairly comprehensive coverage of what parents normally do on a day-to-day basis to keep track of what their children are doing. Even though child disclosure and "monitoring" were highly correlated, controlling for child disclosure did not completely eliminate all the relations between "monitoring" and adjustment, particularly for delinquency. One possible explanation for this is that parents of well-adjusted, nondelinquent youths have sources of information about daily activities that were not considered in this study. Physical presence could be one. Perhaps well-adjusted adolescents do not have to tell their parents where they are and what they are doing, and their parents do not have to ask, because their parents are physically there—for example, the parents and children are at home together or the parents are driving the children to their activities or participating in the activities themselves. These adolescents should be well-adjusted and their parents should know what they are doing without having to be told. Or, to focus on the other end of the child disclosure continuum, perhaps a youth's nondisclosure is not a complete explanation of why parents of poorly adjusted or delinquent youths have little knowledge about their children's daily activities. Perhaps factors such as parental apathy or neglect combine with the child's secretiveness to determine how little parents know about what poorly adjusted

377

youths are doing. The important conclusion to be drawn from the present results, however, is that parents' tracking and surveillance efforts, as represented by solicitation and control, provide no explanation for the links between "monitoring" and adjustment. Child disclosure provides a better explanation, even though it is not always a complete explanation. These findings have implications for several literatures, especially the monitoring literature. Monitoring studies have been widely cited, and the conclusions that parental tracking and surveillance efforts are beneficial have been widely accepted. The present findings call those conclusions into question and suggest that reexamination is in order. But there are other conclusions that should be reexamined, and they are not always obvious, because "monitoring" scales have made their way into other research without being labeled as parental knowledge ("monitoring") measures. A case in point is the recent work distinguishing between "behavioral" and "psychological" control (Barber, 1996; Barber, Olsen, & Shagle, 1994). The argument was that these two types of control would be differently related to internalizing and externalizing behavior. Psychological control (e.g., guilt induction) should create internalizing problems, whereas behavioral control (e.g., curfew rules) should prevent externalizing problems. In one of these studies (Barber, 1996), behavioral control was never actually measured. Instead, it was operationalized by a 5-item "monitoring" scale that measured parental knowledge. The "monitoring" measure was, indeed, related to lower externalizing problems, just as it has been in many "monitoring" studies and as it was in the present study, but it was not a measure of behavioral control, so the hypothesis went untested. In another study (Barber et al., 1994), behavioral control was operationalized two ways: with the "monitoring" measure and with two items that measured parental disengagement (noncontrol). With disengagement as the measure of behavioral control, the results were less clearly supportive of the hypothesis. But, even though they were more construct-valid than "monitoring," the disengagement items were not very good measures of what parents do to control their youths' activities. Consequently, this idea, which has been widely embraced, was not well tested by these studies. Another literature into which "monitoring" scales have made their way without being labeled as parental knowledge ("monitoring") measures is the parenting styles literature. The strictness/ supervision scale that has been used in a number of influential studies (e.g., Glasgow et al., 1997; Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991; Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994) includes these commonly used "monitoring" items: "How much do your parents REALLY know? Where you go at night? What you do with your free time? Where you are most afternoons after school?" "My parents know exactly where I am most afternoons after school." These parental knowledge measures compose almost half of the strictness/supervision measure. The inclusion of these "monitoring" items, because they probably represent child disclosure more than parents' efforts, calls into question the basic assumption that "[p]arenting style is a characteristic of the parent (i.e., it is a feature of the child's social environment), independent of characteristics of the developing person" (Darling & Steinberg, 1993, p. 487). Many parenting styles studies have been done without using these particular measures, but the present results suggest that we should be more attentive to what measures have been used and what they mean,

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even for well-established constructs such as authoritative parenting. These findings confirm that adolescents themselves are active agents in the process through which parents keep track of what they are doing, where they are going, and whom they are with. In fact, they are the primary suppliers of information. It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that child disclosure is something completely separate from anything parents do, because parents' actions probably play a role in a child's willingness to disclose. How parents have reacted to information in the past and how accepting and warm they are, in general, are likely to influence disclosure. One could even argue that parents' past solicitation efforts could influence child disclosure by encouraging the child to develop a habit of disclosing. Very young children could begin talking to parents about their daily activities because the parents ask and listen with interest, and this could become habitual, until the disclosure is independent of parents' asking. This explanation requires assumptions that should not be made without investigation, but investigations into the origins of child disclosure are certainly in order.

that fosters good communication and openness on the child's part is clearly important, but the developmental literature does not tell us what factors cause children to share their experiences with their parents. The literature offers static, unidirectional views of how parental behaviors affect adolescents or of how adolescents perceive their parents' behaviors but few insights into the more realistic, bidirectional processes through which parents and children constantly shape and reshape each other through their mutual actions and reactions (Lerner, Castellino, Terry, Villarruel, & McKinney, 1995). Child disclosure must be seen as part of a transactional developmental process (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Gottlieb, 1991; Johnston, 1987; Sameroff, 1983). Clearly our grandmothers were wrong when they said that children should be seen and not heard. It is not yet known what encourages or inhibits children from sharing their daily experiences, but it might turn out that the most important monitoring and controlling that parents can do is to monitor their own behavior and control their own words and actions that discourage children from being open and communicative.

There are other possible explanations why some children disclose more information to their parents than others, and why those same children are better adjusted regardless of their parents' control and solicitation strategies. One explanation involves child temperament. The high-disclosing children might be temperamentally prone to communicate freely. They might be the "easy" children (Thomas & Chess, 1977) or those who are highly sociable and have little negative emotionality (Buss, 1989; Buss & Plomin, 1984, 1986). These same temperamental predispositions might also make them generally better adjusted because of the way people react to them and because their behavior is consistent with conventional values and expectations. Another potential causal factor is emotional attachment to the family, which has been used in the past to explain why some children refrain from antisocial behavior (Hirschi, 1969). The idea is that children who are emotionally attached to their parents are unlikely to do anything that would embarrass them, such as committing criminal acts. The parents are "psychologically present" with the children when they face tempting situations. This line of reasoning has received some empirical support. Measures of emotional attachment to the family have been linked to good adjustment (Benda & Whiteside, 1995; Sokol-Katz, Dunham, & Zimmerman, 1997). Finally, child disclosure itself might play a causal role in the child's emotional attachment to the family. A recent meta-analytic review of the literature on self-disclosure and liking concluded that there are three robust effects: (a) People who disclose more are liked by others, (b) people disclose more to those they like, and (c) after people disclose to others, they like those people more than before (N. L. Collins & Miller, 1994). Most self-disclosure studies have dealt with initial meetings and intimate self-disclosure, but if the same general mechanisms apply to family communication, then both parents' and children's disclosure should intensify the emotional attachments within the family. For parents, the important practical question is: What should we do to prevent problems? Presently, it appears that the less effective strategy, and one that has the potential of backfiring, is to try to prevent adolescents from getting into trouble by rigorously controlling their activities and associations. Creating a family climate

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Received October 14, 1998 Revision received December 20, 1999 Accepted December 28, 1999 •

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