Chapter 6 190 some others: families sharing certain group-differential characteristics (e.g., personality, parenting style, and culture) could show similar dynamics (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Soenens et al., 2015). On the other hand, scholars have assumed that each family is like no other family: Everyone has unique experiences, shaped by many interacting and dynamic individual and contextual factors, family dynamics are potentially idiosyncratic to every family (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Van Geert & Lichtwarck-Aschoff, 2005). Determining whether subgroups of families function similarly or whether each family functions uniquely is crucial for informing future parenting interventions because these empirical insights will help to determine whether tailored or personalized parenting interventions are needed (August & Gewirtz, 2019; Yap et al., 2019). Aided by a novel research design in which 127 families were followed for 100 consecutive days, the current study examined whether daily parent-adolescent dynamics were either group-differential or idiosyncratic to each family. That is, a data-driven temporal network procedure was applied to examine whether subgroups of families could be identified that share similar temporal (i.e., same-day and next-day) associations between five perceived parenting practices and adolescent positive and negative affect (Gates et al., 2017). The current findings suggest that parenting and adolescent affective well-being were associated in almost all families (86%). However, no data-driven subgroups of families emerged that shared similar parent-adolescent dynamics. Instead, same-day or next-day associations between parenting practices and adolescent affect were found only at the individual family level, meaning that daily parenting-affect associations were specific to only one or a few families. Daily Idiosyncratic Parent-Adolescent Dynamics were Observed in Most Families Theories of human development postulate that parenting is an important proximal factor shaping an individual’s development (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2010). Indeed, the current 100-day diary study rigorously demonstrated that perceived parenting practices are linked to adolescents’ affective well-being in almost all families. That is, in the majority of families (109 out of 127), daily associations were identified between perceived parenting practices and adolescent affect. Going beyond previous studies demonstrating daily linkages between parenting and adolescent affect within the ‘average family’ (e.g., Chung et al., 2009; Schacter & Margolin, 2019), the current family-specific study revealed that such daily linkages could also be observed in most individual families.
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