Chapter 7 216 that parents and adolescents influence each other in heterogeneous ways (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Darling & Steinberg, 1993). Moreover, the findings provide evidence for relativistic views on parenting (Granic et al., 2008; Grusec, 2008; Richters, 2021). That is, every family might have its own unique “recipe” for how parenting and an adolescent’s functioning impact each other over time. The idiosyncratic nature of dynamic parenting processes has large implications for the empirical study of the phenomenon of parenting adolescents. If dynamic parenting processes are indeed idiosyncratic, no “average family” might truly exist. Therefore, average (sub)sample effects, in this dissertation and in other within-family studies (e.g., Kapetanovic et al., 2019; Vrolijk et al., 2020), might apply to only a few or no families. To avoid invalid inferences from “the average family” to a specific individual family, for which methodologists have been warning quite some time (Fisher et al., 2018; Moeller, 2022; Molenaar, 2004), parenting science is strongly encouraged to move away from the between-family paradigm and to instead adopt a family-specific paradigm to understand the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning in unique individual families. The notion of idiosyncratic dynamic parenting processes evidently also has practical implications, such that universal “one-size-fits-all” parenting preventions and interventions are likely not equally effective for every family. Indeed, empirical studies on parenting programs have highlighted that some families benefit more than other families (Van Aar et al., 2019; Weeland et al., 2023). Therefore, parenting scholars might want to be careful when translating empirical nomothetic findings, such as between-family patterns or average within-family effects (Beltz et al., 2016), to general parenting advice. Parents who try to follow general parenting advice that is not matching their family dynamics and needs, might unintentionally harm their adolescent at worst and might experience feelings of incompetence and parenting stress when the advice is not working for their specific adolescent child. Hence, parenting preventions and interventions may be improved by tailoring to the needs of individual families (August & Gewirtz, 2019; Weeland et al., 2021). To do so, parenting science may want to learn from contemporary approaches in clinical psychology and psychiatry (e.g., Myin-Germeys et al., 2018), for instance by implementing self-monitoring (Swendeman et al., 2020) prior to, during, and after an intervention to understand the dynamic parenting processes of an individual family and to assess whether processes have been changing in the desired direction (Bamberger, 2016; Keijsers et al., 2022). Overall, the current methodological advances in parenting
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