5 The direction of effects is family-specific 165 & Vansteenkiste, 2020) propose that influences between parents and adolescents are reciprocal, our findings suggest that this conclusion may only hold for a subgroup of families, and for certain sets of behaviors and emotions. In other words, every family has their own unique way of interacting in everyday life. This means that there may be potential drawbacks of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to family interventions, and that it may be important to move toward tailoring interventions to the specific dynamics and needs of a family (August & Gewirtz, 2019; Weeland et al., 2021). We found several meaningful adolescent attributes that explained the heterogeneity in directionality, and thus, speak to why parents and adolescents might differentially influence each other across families. First, heightened negative affect seemed to exhibit a stronger influence on parents’ controlling behaviors among younger adolescents. As parents generally exert less control as adolescents become older (Lionetti et al., 2018), they might be more inclined to give older adolescents more space to deal with negative emotions than younger adolescents. Second, the positive affect of adolescents who reported higher trait levels of environmental sensitivity, specifically sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) (Pluess et al., 2018), seemed more strongly influenced by parenting behaviors. This finding is consistent with environmental sensitivity theories, which propose that an underlying phenotypic trait, such as SPS, leads to a higher responsivity to the environment (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Greven et al., 2019). Third, daily fluctuations in parenting were more strongly tied to daily fluctuations in negative affect among adolescents with higher neuroticism, converging with prior work indicating that neuroticism is associated with enhanced negative feelings, especially in reaction (negative) events in daily life (Suls & Martin, 2005). In addition to the direction of effects, our findings reveal insights into the nature of everyday parent-adolescent dynamics. Overall, we found that reinforcing cycles (e.g., more warmth → more positive affect → more warmth) are more prominent than inhibiting cycles (e.g., more warmth → more positive affect → less warmth). From a dynamic systems perspective, reciprocal influences can result in either change or growth by reinforcing feedback loops or stabilization by inhibiting feedback loops (Kunnen et al., 2019). This is consistent with our findings highlighting the prominence of these reinforcing reciprocal cycles during periods of change (i.e., adolescence). Indeed, adolescence is a period in which parent-child relationships need to be realigned (Smetana & Rote, 2019). A second COVID-19 lockdown, however, started halfway through the study (De Vries et al., 2023), which could have destabilized the family system. Examining non-linear dynamics,
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