Chapter 6 172 INTRODUCTION Parenting adolescents involves a dynamic interplay between a variety of parenting practices and adolescents’ well-being (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Darling & Steinberg, 1993). While it is widely theorized that parent-adolescent dynamics vary across families (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Smith & Thelen, 2003), there are divergent ideas about how and why these dynamics might vary. On one hand, it has been suggested that the nature of parent-adolescent dynamics varies from subgroup to subgroup; for instance, due to the child’s personality (Pluess, 2015), legitimacy beliefs of parental authority (Darling et al., 2007), a parent’s stable parenting style (Darling & Steinberg, 1993), or culture (Soenens et al., 2015). In other words, it has been implicitly assumed that families that share the same group-differential characteristics tend to be influenced in quite similar ways. On the other hand, other theoretical accounts have adopted an idiosyncratic view, suggesting that how parents and adolescents influence each other is unique to each family (Granic et al., 2008; Grusec, 2008). For example, according to ecological models, the nature of parent-adolescent dynamics varies not only due to the characteristics of the developing adolescent, but also because of the changing characteristics of the context and timing of events (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2010). To date, it has not yet been empirically determined whether subgroups of families function similarly or whether each family functions in their own idiosyncratic way. The primary reason why is that it has rarely been tested how parents and adolescents influence each other in a diverse range of behaviors and emotions at the level of the individual family (for reviews see Boele et al., 2020; Keijsers et al., 2022). To advance empirical knowledge, this 100-day diary study examined the daily dynamics between various parenting practices and adolescent affect in individual families and explored whether data-driven subgroups of families emerged that exhibited similar dynamics. The Study of Subgroups with Stable Parenting Styles Previous research has extensively examined the role of parenting styles in explaining differences in the way parents raise adolescents. Parenting styles represent typologies based on combined parenting dimensions, with a focus on the two dimensions of parental support and behavioral control (Baumrind, 1991). Studies have provided valuable insights into how average levels of combined parenting dimensions and adolescent outcomes differ between subgroups of families. For example, adolescents raised by authoritative parents (i.e., high in both support and control) display better psychosocial functioning than those raised by parents with different parenting styles (e.g., Kuppens & Ceulemans, 2019). However, it has been increasingly stressed that group-level (between-family) associations
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