Adolescents' relationships with mother and father and their links to the quality of romantic relationships: A classification approach

Abstract

Adolescents' relationships with parents are considered to be a major learning source and emotional base for developing expectations and styles of behaviour in close relationships. Using a longitudinal sample of late adolescents from nuclear families drawn from the German Family Panel pairfam (N = 720; mean age: 18.6 years), we investigated how adolescents' relationships with both parents influenced their romantic relationship quality one year later. Bagged (Averaged) Binary Recursive Partitioning was used to compare features of adolescents' relationships with mother and father (relatedness, negative conflict, emotional insecurity, and parental dominance) in respect of their importance in predicting similar aspects of romantic relationship quality. Overall, our findings suggest some degree of domain-specific continuities in adolescents' relationships with parents and partner, particularly for negative conflict, as well as more global effects for most features of the parent–adolescent relationship. Emotional insecurity with mother was most broadly linked to all features of adolescents' romantic relationship. Overall, adolescents' relationship with mother was found to be more influential than their relationship with father. The findings are discussed with reference to a behavioural systems perspective and attachment theory.

Keywords::

• Parent–adolescent relationship
• Romantic relationship
• Partnership quality
• Late adolescence
• Attachment theory

We thank Dr. Ulrich Pötter for conducting the statistical analyses, Christina Gschwendtner for preparatory work, Xuan Li for careful language checks, and, last but not least, all participants of the pairfam panel.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

This research was supported by a grant of the German Research Foundation to the first author (Wa 949/11-1 through 3) as co-principle investigator of the German Family Panel pairfam at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich. This paper uses data from the pairfam panel, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper. pairfam is funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG).