Chapter 5 166 preferably while linking short-term dynamics to longer-term development, is a promising avenue for future work, as it may help unravel how everyday family dynamics become a driving force in developmental trajectories. This pre-registered idiographic study examined day-to-day parent-adolescent dynamics at the individual family level by rigorously analyzing more than 14,000 daily diaries of 159 adolescents. Despite these strengths, our findings must be considered in light of several limitations. First, different inference criteria could have revealed different effects; this is important to consider in emerging idiographic research, as strong precedents for such criteria are lacking. Here family-specific inferences were based on the smallest effect size of interest (SESOI; β ≥ .05) rather than significance levels (Beyens et al., 2021; Boele, Bülow, de Haan et al., 2023). Preferably, future intensive longitudinal studies with more data points per family will combine a SESOI with a threshold of statistical significance (Lakens et al., 2018). Second, we studied adolescent-perceived parenting, and prior research has shown discrepancies between parents and adolescents in their perception of daily parenting behavior (Janssen et al., 2021). Future work is needed to explore the heterogeneity in how parents perceive daily parent-adolescent dynamics. Third, the current day-to-day findings might not generalize across timescales, so other timescales also warrant attention in future studies, such as a momentary (instead of a daily) timescale (Keijsers et al., 2022). Fourth, the sample consisted of more female than male adolescents, and the majority were highly educated, which might have limited our ability to detect sex and educational differences. Future studies with larger and more diverse samples are needed to gain more insight into individual factors that might explain heterogeneity among adolescents. In conclusion, most contemporary parenting theories posit that parents and children mutually affect one another (Pardini, 2008; Sameroff, 2010), especially during adolescence, when children become more active agents within the parent-child relationship (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2020). Our findings, however, point towards a more nuanced understanding that was achieved by adopting a novel idiographic approach to the investigation of families’ unique daily dynamics: The direction of day-to-day influences between parenting and adolescent well-being depends on the family and on the parenting behaviors and adolescent emotions under consideration. Environmental sensitivity and neuroticism appear to be promising traits for understanding why some adolescents are more strongly affected by parenting than are others. Hence, rather than being a homogeneous phenomenon, the ways in which parents and adolescents influence each
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