Who Is More Important for Early Adolescents' Developmental Choices?

Abstract

This study examined whether early adolescents identified parents or peers as sources of intimacy and influence for developmental choices having both long-and short-term consequences. Short-term choices were adolescents' daily lifestyle preferences for clothing, music, and hairstyles that are important for peer identification, whereas, long-term choices were preferences having more distant consequences in the lives of early adolescents consisting of success in school, sexual involvement, and substance use. A sample of 135 adolescents was surveyed in seventh-grade classrooms about whether parents or peers were sources of influence and intimate relationships. Results provided some evidence that peers (friends) tended to have somewhat greater influence on the broadest array of developmental choices and on short-term (or lifestyle) developmental choices. However, parents tended to have stronger overall influence over adolescents' choices having longer-term developmental consequences. Moreover, early adolescents desired to spend more time with parents than peers and reported intimate relationships of similar quality with both parents and peers. Despite these general patterns, when specific short-term (or lifestyle) and specific long-term issues were examined separately, a disparate pattern of parent and peer influences was identified, which was the predominant pattern found in this study.

Key Words:

• Intimacy
• lifestyle choices
• long-term choices
• parental influence
• parent-early adolescent relations
• peer influence