Families at risk for destructive parent-child relations in adolescence

This paper examines the parental, adolescent, and family system characteristics that place a family at risk for destructive parent-child relations in adolescence. It is based on a study of 62 families, all of which contained a youth (age 10-16) and 2 parents and were referred because of the adjustment problems of the adolescent. A 3-member team visited the family at home to administer a 3 1/2-hour battery of questionnaire, interview, and observation instruments. These included a measure of risk for destructive parent-child relations (the Adolescent-Abuse Inventory); the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist; a measure of the family as an interactional system (FACES); the Cornell Parent Behavior Description; and assessments of adolescent physical maturation, interparental conflict, cognitive functioning, life events (A-FILE), and demographic and socioeconomic factors. The results permit identification of families as high risk for destructive parent-child relations using the parental scores on the Adolescent-Abuse Inventory. The high-risk group tends to be "chaotic" and "enmeshed" (FACES), to include more stepparents, to be more punishing and less supportive (Cornell Parent Behavior Description), and to be more stressed by life changes (A-FILE). Adolescents in the high-risk families are characterized by significantly more developmental problems (both internalizing and externalizing), and the number of such problems correlates significantly with the risk for destructive parent-child relations. The development of adolescent psychopathology appears to interact with the evolution of a high-risk family system to produce destructive relationships between parents and their adolescent offspring. Stepfamilies appear especially vulnerable to this dysfunctional evolution.