An investigation of adolescent responses to parental rules: A social relational approach

According to clinical and behavioural models of noncompliance, children's resistance is a negative or maladaptive reaction to parental demands. It is argued that such models ignore the purposive or agentic behaviour of children. This dissertation uses social relational theory, which asserts that resistance is a normative response to control within a close relationship, to explore adolescents' resistance to parental demands. Social relational theory argues that both children and parents interact as agents who pursue personal goals, but who are also constrained by their relationship with one another. As agents, children are assumed to resist in a variety of ways depending on their goals and the social context. Two studies are presented. The first is an exploratory, survey based, study that investigates associations between overt and covert resistance, adolescent goals and how expressions of resistance change across context. The results of this study support the argument that how resistance is expressed depends on adolescents' particular goals. Results suggest that resistance is expressed more overtly with mothers than with fathers and that more overt resistance is predicted by relationships in which there is less psychological control and more parental perspective taking. The second study is qualitative and uses an interpretive inductive framework to interpret adolescents' firsthand accounts of their resistance. The thematic analysis investigated how adolescents understand parental rules, how they go about resisting parental demands and how resistance is rationalized through their personal goals. The analysis suggested that rules were often co-constructed between parents and adolescents and that resistance to rules took many forms that varied with respect to the level of openness and the degree to which they accommodated parental values. Results are used to present a model of resistance as accommodative in adolescence and of parents' behaviour serving co-regulatory functions. Implications for socialization theory and for clinical practice are discussed.