6 Like no other? 191 Despite the omnipresence of daily dynamics between parenting practices and adolescent affect, no evidence was found of general dynamics (i.e., shared by the whole sample). That is, whether and how the five parenting practices were intertwined with the adolescents’ positive and negative affect varied considerably among the families. It is, however, noteworthy that a substantial portion of the adolescents reported feeling more positive (36%) and less negative (20%) on days when they perceived increased parental warmth. This suggests that parental warmth contributes to the daily affective well-being of many adolescents, though not universally. Furthermore, no subgroup-specific (i.e., shared by a subgroup of families) parent-adolescent dynamics were found. In other words, the nature of daily parent-adolescent dynamics did not generalize to subgroups of families. Although two data-driven subgroups were found (ns = 77 and 45), families in these subgroups did not share similar daily associations between parenting and affect. Instead, the first subgroup shared a same-day association between positive and negative affect (which was also shared with other families outside this subgroup) and the second subgroup exhibited similar same-day associations between distinct parenting practices. A potential explanation for the same-day parenting-parenting associations in the latter subgroup might be that these adolescents were less capable of differentiating between distinct practices. Thus, despite group-differential effects have been theorized, for instance, due to shared individual characteristics (e.g., personality, parenting style; Pluess, 2015; Darling & Steinberg, 1993) or contextual characteristics (e.g., culture; Soenens et al., 2015), the current findings do not support the notion that subgroups of families that exhibit homogenous parent-adolescent dynamics in everyday life exist. Understanding Parenting as an Idiosyncratic Phenomenon Many theories focus on the unique (subjective) experiences of an individual child, shaped by many interacting individual and contextual factors (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Thus far, however, the existing paradigm of group-based patterns (i.e., variation between families) has not allowed scholars to understand the unique dynamics of individual families (i.e., over-time variation within families; Molenaar & Campbell, 2009). By examining how daily fluctuations in perceived parenting practices and adolescent affect were related across 100 days in each single family separately, the current study demonstrated that daily parent-adolescent dynamics were highly idiosyncratic. That is, it depended on the family which of the parenting practices (i.e., warmth, autonomy support, psychological control, strictness, and monitoring) were linked to the adolescent’s affective well-being (for example, see Figure 5). Although all five practices showed associations with adolescent
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