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How Should Mothers React When They First Learn About Their Child’s Involvement With Deviant Peers? The Adolescents’ Perspective

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Abstract

Little is known regarding how parents’ responses when first learning about their adolescents’ deviant peer affiliation affect adolescents’ further affiliation and disclosure of risk behavior to parents. Studies on the effects of parents’ warnings to control adolescents’ material or personal information resources are particularly scarce. To address these gaps, 237 Jewish Israeli adolescents who self-identified as interacting with deviant peers (40.50% female, mean age = 14.55 years, age range = 13–16 years) reported their mothers’ actual or anticipated responses when learning for the first time about their deviant peer affiliation. The results indicated that mothers’ warnings to control adolescents’ material and information resources were experienced as less frustrating and more satisfying of adolescents’ psychological needs than was mothers’ enactment of resource control. Mothers’ responses of autonomy support and warnings to use resource control were positively associated with cessation of deviant peer affiliation. Mothers’ enactment of resource control was associated with adolescents’ less disclosure and consultation with their mothers regarding risk behaviors, whereas the reverse was true for the general practice of autonomy support. Possible need-related mechanisms underlying the associations of warnings with the cessation of deviant peer affiliation are discussed. The results highlight the importance of parents’ autonomy-supportive response to the onset of deviant peer affiliation as a specific strategy that has benefits beyond the positive effects of the general practice of autonomy support. These findings suggest that it is important to promote an autonomy-supportive response to the onset of deviant peer affiliation also among parents who are generally autonomy-supportive.

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Acknowledgements

We express our sincere gratitude to the adolescents who participated in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Efrat Sher-Censor

  2. Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Noam Yitshaki & Avi Assor

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  1. Efrat Sher-Censor
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Contributions

E.S.C. and A.A. conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, conducted statistical analyses and drafted the paper. N.Y. participated in data collection and statistical analyses and drafted the paper. All authors read and approved the final paper.

Funding

The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.

Data Sharing and Declaration

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository, doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/4DNM2

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Efrat Sher-Censor.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

Study procedure and measures were approved by the Human Research Review Board of the participating universities (#025/12; #1104-12) and the chief scientist of the Ministry of Education (#719). The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Informed Consent

Active informed consent was obtained from the adolescents and passive informed consent was required from parents. The latter procedure entailed parents’ receipt of a letter from the researchers providing information about the purposes of the study and its method. Parents were asked to complete a form if they did not wish their adolescent child to participate in the study. No parent completed this form.

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Sher-Censor, E., Yitshaki, N. & Assor, A. How Should Mothers React When They First Learn About Their Child’s Involvement With Deviant Peers? The Adolescents’ Perspective. J Youth Adolescence 50, 935–951 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01383-y

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