Relationships With Parents and Peers in Adolescence

What roles do parents and peers play in adolescent development? The answers that developmental research offers to this question are limited by two features of the literatures on parenting and peer relationships. The first is that these two literatures are largely separate, with little theorizing about connections between parent-adolescent relationships and adolescents' choices of peer contexts. The second is that they make the simplifying assumption that parents and peers affect adolescents in unidirectional fashion, with little or no recognition of bi-directional effects. In this chapter, we examine the parenting and peer literatures separately, reviewing the major works upon which broad conclusions have been drawn, and pointing out limitations such as the unidirectional-effects assumption, construct-invalid measures, and, for peer research, limiting investigations to peers in the school classroom. Concerning parenting, we argue for a bi-directional approach to parent-adolescent relationships. Concerning peers, we argue for ecologically valid research designs. We then offer a theoretical integration of the parenting and peer literatures that sees adolescents as active agents who choose their peer contexts based, in part, on the feelings they have about their experiences in the parent context. The chapter concludes by recommending that research on adolescents' relationships with parents and peers become more integrative, bi-directional, and developmental, even if these features make research more difficult. Keywords: bidirectional models; developmental context; ecological validity; parents; peers; relationships