7 Summary and general discussion 209 2). For example, the effect size of parental psychological control predicting next-day adolescent negative affect was .04 (Chapter 5), which is a small effect according to recent guidelines (Orth et al., 2022). Some researchers argue that such small effects may not have a practical impact on adolescent functioning (Pelham et al., 2022). However, bio(psychosocial) ecological models (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2010) and dynamic system theories (Granic et al., 2008; Smith & Thelen, 2003) argue that repeated daily effects parenting might accumulate over time, resulting in meaningful effects on adolescent functioning in the longer term. Thus, although the micro-timescale effects of perceived parenting on adolescent functioning, and vice versa, appear weak at first glance, repeated effects may accumulate into more substantial, meaningful effects in the long run. 2.2 Meso-timescale processes Theories on human development thus highlight that the daily influences between parents and their adolescents accumulate across time, instigating longer-term changes in adolescents’ development (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2010; Smith & Thelen, 2003). Though most theories do not explicitly describe the length of this timeframe, such accumulation might occur on a meso-timescale, including weeks and months (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Thelen & Smith, 1994). However, as the systematic review in Chapter 2 shows, meso-timescales have been largely neglected in longitudinal parenting studies. Therefore, this dissertation introduced a new intensive meso-longitudinal study design to examine the potential existence of meso-timescale processes between parenting and adolescent functioning within families. Specifically, I followed 256 Dutch adolescents every other week for a full year. With this data, I was able to examine how adolescent-perceived parental warmth and psychological control were on average related to adolescents’ psychological functioning (i.e., depressive and anxiety symptoms and self-esteem) within families on a bi-weekly timescale (Chapters 3 & 4). Moreover, I examined how parental warmth was related to adolescents’ depressive symptoms on a three-monthly timescale by using an existing dataset of 244 Dutch adolescents (Chapter 3; see Table 2). Indeed, the findings suggest that parenting and adolescent functioning may influence each other within families on a bi-weekly and three-monthly timescale (see Table 2). Interestingly, these meso-timescale parenting processes differed to some extent to the previously described micro-timescale processes (see 2.1). That is, in contrast to the daily
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