Parent-adolescent relations and problem behaviors: Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States

The current investigation examined the predictive strength of mother/father-adolescent relations (closeness, support, and monitoring) and of low self-control for a variety of adolescent problem behaviors in samples from Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Based on data from over N = 6,900 middle and late adolescents, findings indicated the following: (1) each family process dimension was predictive of adolescent problem behaviors in all national contexts. And, despite some overlap between maternal and paternal measures of parent-adolescent relations, each measure had unique and additive explanatory power in adolescent problem behaviors; (2) family processes were predictive of all types of problem behaviors ranging from trivial school misconduct to more serious behaviors such as assault; (3) pairwise comparisons of partial regression coefficients of individual family process dimensions predicting problem behaviors indicated that they were largely identical cross-nationally; (4) final prediction models accounted for between 30% (Swiss youth) and 37% (American and Dutch youth) of the variance in problem behaviors. These findings provide further support for the idea of universal developmental processes.