Adolescent Obedience and Strategic Disclosure: Nancy Darling
1. How did you become interested in parent-adolescent relationships?
I had done a lot of different types of things, and I had studied as an undergraduate art and interior design. And one of the things I did while I was doing that was waitress. And one of the things I found was that when I was waitressing, the whole way that I thought about things cognitively and the way I organized memory was entirely different. And I got really interested in how different job experiences changed my thought, and that's actually how I got interested in psychology.
2. What is your current area of research?
> One of the things I was really interested in was parent-child relationships. And I was interested actually in infants, but infants can't fill out surveys. So I started studying adolescents, because they can fill out surveys. And one of the major areas, if you're interested in both positive behaviors like academics and negative behaviors like avoiding getting drunk and getting in trouble and getting pregnant, is parental monitoring and how parents learn about and get information about their kids’ lives. And that's been one of the most robust predictors in all the, it's like, “Do you know where your children are, it's 10 o'clock?”-- that comes from that literature on parental monitoring. And what I do, what we try to discover is, we'd always thought about this as an attribute of the parent; they ask questions, they pay attention. And one of the things that has come out recently is well, you know, kids have a lot to do with this. So we started studying what we called politely“strategic disclosure of information.” In other words what do kids decide to tell to their parents and what do they lie about. What do they decide to keep from their parents? And so we were really looking at the active role of the child in this monitoring process, because kids don't get offered drinks when their parents are standing next to them. They need to think about what their parents have taught them. They make their own decisions and they have to share that information with their parents. So we really started focusing on what the kid's role was in this parent socialization process.
3. What research findings most surprised you?
> We've studied kids lying to their parents all around the world, and we found that kids fight with their parents about the same things: about cleaning their rooms, about who their friends are, about what they dress like. Same things Philippines, Hispanic kids in Miami, in Chile, in Italy, in Central Pennsylvania; they fight with their parents about the same things. And one of the things that a lot of parents believe is that the best way to get your kids to obey you and to disclose is to be warm. No, don't set rules; we're just going to talk about things. Actually that's not true. In Chile, where that really is very much the norm, kids lie to their parents more than any place else. And typically kids...what's important in whether or not kids obey parents and whether or not they disclose to them is whether they think their parents are legitimate authorities. In other words do they have the right to set rules? Do they have the right to ask these questions? And that comes about because the parents are emotionally warm, but also because the parents have exerted authority. In other words, they've set rules, and they've expected the child to obey them. They've explained why the rules are there, but when the kids see that the parents are setting rules, and they care about them enough to set rules, and the parents are emotionally warm, the kids are much more responsive both in terms of they share more information, but they also obey more. What was really surprising to me is we found, we asked, you know, “What do you have the right, you know, what do you have your parents have the right to set rules about?” “What do you have to disclose?” They said, "Well, they don't have the right to ask me any questions because they haven't bothered to set rules. They don't care about me enough to say, 'You shouldn't be drinking,' or 'you shouldn't be getting in trouble.' That's part of what legitimates their authorities. It's their job as parents to care about me." They're supposed to set rules, and if they don't, they lose, the parents, the kids lose their respect for their parents, and they just say, "Why should I tell them anything? Why should I obey them? They don't care enough to try to stop me from getting in trouble," and that was really surprising to me. And we found that in the Philippines, we found that in Chile, we found that in the United States, and we found it in Italy. It's exactly the same thing.
4. Describe cross-cultural findings on the relationship between parent behaviors and adolescent obedience and self-disclosure.
> It's actually interesting; it varies by country. One of the things that you find out is that in the United States, which is where I grew up, is what matters both is that the parents are warm, they're supportive, the kids, you know, care about them. That's actually the very best predictor of disclosure and also obedience in the United States. Warmth is, uh control is also important. You know, setting rules. In the Philippines on the other hand warmth is irrelevant. All that matters is the parents are strict and that may be because in the Philippines the kids are never alone. They’re either at school, they're under supervision by a nanny; there's always someone in the house so they don't spend a lot of time autonomously. In Chile it's somewhere in between; both the rules and the warmth are important. But yeah, absolutely, you'd expect though, that the sort of common knowledge is that parents are too strict and the kids hide. That actually doesn't happen. The kids whose parents are too strict, who are very psychologically intrusive, are obedient and really depressed. So it's not that they get in trouble, it's that they internalize it and they get depressed. They don't tend to rebel, they tend to be too ground down to do that. So it's not the common logic; it's not good for them, but it's not that they're going to rebel. The kids who tend to go wild and get in trouble have parents who are actually very loose. They don't set rules, they don't set standards. They're loving and accepting no matter what the kids do, but a lot of times the kids interpret that as, “They just don't care.” You know, we'll ask them, “When's your curfew Friday night?” and they'll say “Sunday afternoon.” And I say, “Well what will your parents think about if they knew how much you were drinking?” and they say, “They don't care.” And that's what they mean. It's not just that they don't care about their drinking, but that they don't care about them,because if they cared about them they would tell them not to drink, because they are their parents and that's what parents are supposed to do. The kids may not like it, they may not obey them, but they know that that's what parents are supposed to do.
5. Do peers and siblings contribute to the effectiveness of parental monitoring?
> We haven't looked at siblings in that sense. We did do one study with siblings that looked at the constellation of whether you're, in terms of two kids in the same household, and whether the monitoring was the same, and whether that was the same depending upon their peer groups. And what we found was that when the, that the monitoring had more of an effect if the kid was in a problem peer group. And that made a lot of sense, because if you've got parents who know what you're doing that's supposed to prevent problem behavior. Well you don't randomly decide, “Oh, I'm going to go out all by myself and get in trouble” if you go out with your friends. And so if you've got basically good friends, parental monitoring doesn't make that much of a difference. But if your sister or your brother on the other hand, they've got the same good monitoring parents, but they're hanging out with kids that are much more problematic, their monitoring makes a difference, because they're the kid that's going to get offered the drink. They're the kid that is going to get, you know, asked to do these more, these things that parental monitoring is supposed to prevent. That's where it makes a difference. If you're hanging out with good kids, you're not that interested in getting in trouble; monitoring doesn't make that much of a difference, because there's nothing to prevent. It's really when it's the brother or sister who has the problem that that really tends to be, you see the larger effect.
6. How does parental monitoring change with age, and why is it more difficult to monitor adolescents than children?
> Monitoring changes. Depending upon how old you are. When you're a, when you've got an infant you monitor them by sitting right next, you have them on your lap in fact, usually. You monitor toddlers by staying in the same room and you monitor your elementary school kid by looking out the kitchen window or knowing where they are in the house and following the video game noises. But what it fundamentally changes in adolescence, becuase the way you monitor adolescents is by asking the questions, because you're not at the party with them, you're not at the game with them; they're out on their own. And so monitoring stops being something that parents do by watching directly, or asking the teacher directly, or asking the other parent directly. Monitoring happens because you ask the child what's going on in their lives, and if the child doesn't want to tell you, you're out of luck, because you can't really directly talk to the teachers, you can't talk to the friends, and you can't spy on the parties. Those are inappropriate parenting behaviors. So it really starts being something that is fundamental to the adolescent and what we've found; we have a longitudinal study where we followed the same kids and their parents for five years and what we found is what matters for parents is that if the kid believes that their parent is a legitimate authority. They say, “I have to obey them, if I don't, if I disagree with them I have to tell, they set reasonable rules, they're doing it because they care about me.” Those kids, all kids, as they get older and older get in more and more trouble and they also tend to believe less and less that their parents have a legitimate authority. More things become private. There's more and more areas of your life that you decide are just your decision and not your parents’. But some kids come into adolescence believing that their parents have a right to set rules about everything, and some come in saying they have a right to set the rules about nothing. When we look at the development over time, we find that 12 year olds who believe their parents have no right to set rules about everything look like 17 year olds who come in in the other way. In other words they prematurely decide their parents have no right to set rules about their lives. And those are the kids that are really in trouble. So everybody changes, but they start at different places and that pivotal point seems to be on the entrance to adolescence. So those differences already exist when they enter teenage lives. They seem to be formed during childhood.
7. Under what circumstances are adolescents most likely to disclose information to their parents?
> Kids share information with their parents in lots of different ways. We always thought it was direct inquiry. In other words, you come home, your parent says, “What did you do today?” and then you tell them. In fact that's not one of the most important ways to ask kids. In fact they always say “nothing” or “nothing happened all day long.” You know, that's one of the big parent complaints. What tends to happen is in a relatively good relationship is kids talk because everybody talks when they're spending time with their parents not doing anything else. So I always found, when I think about my own adolescence, when did I talk to my mother? When she was driving me around. Why? Because we were in the car for 20 minutes and I had nothing else to do, so I just start talking about my friends, what was happening at school, my boyfriend. And she would ask these very non-directive non-judgmental questions, and I would just keep talking and she learned all the important grotty stuff that I didn't want her to know, because I was just talking to her in this non-interrogative way. So she, I just talked because I was bored. I always figured the best place for monitoring is you're sitting down at the dinner table, you've got nothing else to talk about between passing the beets; you share information. The same thing, you're doing something really boring, you're raking leaves and you've got nothing else to think about, and kids just talk about their lives. Those are the very most functional ways for parents to get information if they're listening. The least useful way is for the parents to say, “Where were you?” because the kid immediately has all their defenses up and they're going to give away as little information as possible, because it's sort of assumed that they're already in trouble. And what we've found in fact, is that a lot of kids are, not surprisingly, they're motivated not to talk to their parents, because they don't want to get in trouble. And so avoiding -- only kids who are seriously in trouble lie to their parents directly. Kids are much better at saying, “Can I go to this party?” and not mentioning, “Oh yeah, there's a keg there” or “The parents aren't home,” or critical details. And so when we, that's what we ask about is, “Do you tell everything or do you tell part?” And then if they only tell part, it’s like, “Do you lie, do you leave out key details?” or “Do you just change things slightly?” And those are actually much more common. Lying is actually the thing that is really a marker of kids who are seriously in trouble. Most kids do it through omission. And careful questions by parents, actually they could be really good at getting out the information they really want like, you know, “Who's going to be home,” you know, “Do their parents know what's going on? Who is supervising this? Do you have enough money to get back if you get in trouble?” Those kind of questions are actually much better at getting out good information from kids and they’re not as direct either.
8. Do parents tend to monitor boys and girls differently?
> It used to be thought, a lot actually, that parents were much stricter with their girls than boys and they monitor much better. We have actually no evidence of that. Even in Chile. There is in the Philippines; they monitor the girls more than boys. But in Chile, which I thought of as a very traditional country, you actually don't see it at all and not in the United States either. What you do find is that boys think that their parents know just as much as girls’ do, but if you ask them, the parents tend to know more about girls because girls just talk more. [Chuckle] They just talk more.
9. Where do you see your research heading in the future?
> We've been doing a lot of information where we've interviewed hundreds of children, and we've also literally had questionnaires filled out by thousands of kids all over the world and their parents. Where we're going to be going next, actually, is we're going to be observations where we're going to bring the parents and the kids in. We're going to look at how they argue about something that's important to them that they -- it's not hard to find a con -- something of conflict with parents and kids of adolescents. We're going to be watching the style in which the parent talks to the child; how judgmental they are, how open they are to listening, how affirming they are, how clever they are, how subtle they are in terms of, just let me hear what you've got to say. And we're going to be looking at how that associates with how volatile the relationship is, some biological markers with that. And also in terms of how that plays out long term in terms of problems with peers and problems with romantic relationships.