Adapting to the changing needs of adolescents: parenting practices and challenges to sensitive attunement

Changes in adolescents’ motivations and capabilities pose unique challenges to parents who play a continuing role in ensuring the youth’s safety and well-being. We describe sensitively attuned parenting as an optimal response to this challenge and summarize practices of positive engagement, supervision/guidance and open communication that support sensitive attunement and facilitate the continuing development of the adolescent’s self-confidence, autonomous decision-making, and communication skills. We then consider factors that require parents to adapt their practices to the particular needs and developmental level of the adolescent. Individual differences that may challenge parent’s effectiveness in implementing these practices include: biological vulnerabilities, differential sensitivity to parenting, relationship history and temperament. Clinical interventions that seek to improve parenting offer an opportunity to test sensitive attunement as a mechanism for reducing adolescents’ symptoms and problem behaviors.