3 Transactional processes between support and depressive symptoms 101 symptoms to perceived parental support within families. In terms of the short-term lagged effect, no evidence was found that changes in adolescent negative affect were followed by subsequent changes in perceived parental support. Hence, on average, adolescents did not perceive that their parent responded to their increased negative feelings at a daily timescale. Nonetheless, as adolescents’ perceptions could be biased by their more negative feelings (Rudolph, 2009), it is possible that parents did respond to the emotional needs of their adolescent but that the adolescent perceived their parent as nonresponding. In line with this argumentation, exploratory findings indeed suggested that only adolescents with lower levels of negative affect (and not adolescents with higher levels of negative affect) perceived an increase in parental support after they reported an increase in their negative affect the day before. Additionally, these findings might also suggest that parents are less likely to react supportively to adolescents who show on average higher levels of negative affect because of already ongoing relationship erosion processes (Coyne, 1976; Rudolph, 2009). With regard to longer-term timescales, the relationship erosion hypothesis received support, although not on the expected macro-timescales of 1 or 2 years. That is, within families, elevated adolescent depressive symptoms predicted declines in perceived parental support 2 weeks and 3 months later. Although interpersonal theories of depression focus on clinical depressive episodes or disorders (Coyne, 1976; Rudolph, 2009), this study suggests that increased depressive symptoms also negatively affect the parent-child relationship in community samples, at least from the perspective of the adolescent. Together, the key-findings of the current study show that adolescents’ depressive symptoms predicted how they perceived their parent’s support and not the other way around. Adolescent-driven processes, instead of transactional processes (i.e., bidirectional effects), have also been found in prior within-family parenting studies (Nelemans et al., 2020; Van Lissa et al., 2019). Together, these within-family studies seem to add arguments to the still ongoing and unsettled debate in parenting literature regarding the often overestimated influence that parents have upon adolescent children and the underestimated role of adolescent-driven effects (Harris, 1995; Kerr et al., 2012). Towards a Continuous Time Perspective Integrating datasets with five timescales in one study, our findings raise questions how to view transactions between parents and children from a continuous time perspective, and how to design research which is sensitive to capturing the processes at stake (Voelkle
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