Perception about adult caregiving among Chilean adolescents

Chronic stress has short and long-term consequences during child and adolescent development if the stress is not mediated by adult care-giving.

To assess the perceptions of parental responsiveness, demand, and monitoring among seventh grade students.

We applied the Brief Parental Scale (developed and validated locally) asking 12 items about three dimensions, namely responsiveness, demand, and monitoring to 524 seventh grade students aged 12 years, 48% females, from eight public and private schools at Santiago.

The overall response rate was 85%. While the scores were higher for mothers, a significantly constant gradient for the same dimensions (demand > responsiveness > monitoring) was verified for both parents.

The main hypothesis emerged from our study is that adolescents seem to perceive a discrepancy in terms of a relatively high demand and lower monitoring from parents/guardians towards them. The differences between fathers and mothers in adolescent care and the different perceptions by gender of adolescents about parental caregiving, require a further analysis.