Chapter 2 66 their children influences the adolescents’ interpersonal behavior within other relation- ships, such as the peer relationship. Thus far, two daily diary studies have assessed the concurrent association between parent-child interactions and peer problems in general, but these found no supporting evidence that within-family fluctuations in parental support and parent-child conflict were related to fluctuations in adolescents’ peer problems (Bai et al., 2017; Lehman & Repetti, 2007). To the best of our knowledge, no studies have incorporated more elaborate indicators of interpersonal peer functioning, such as friend- ship support or hostility towards peers. Thus, even though parenting theories provide the conceptual frameworks for testing how changes in parenting may lead to improvements in adolescent adaptation, many theoretical ideas await testing at the within-family level where these dynamic parenting processes take place. Reciprocity between Parents and Adolescents Although many of the developmental theories on parenting argue that parenting processes include bi-directional effects between parents and their children (e.g., coercion theory, monitoring literature), only eight out of 46 included studies examined reciprocal timelagged effects, which allows for a test of such reciprocal patterns. Notably, these eight studies focused primarily on adolescent externalizing behavior. The results appeared to provide little support for some of the well-known theories that operate within families. For example, the results of the study of Besemer et al. (2016), do not support a reinforcing cycle between poor parent-child communication and externalizing behavior, which is proposed by the coercion theory (Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984). In contrast, one study even found a reinforcing cycle between higher levels of father involvement and adolescent delinquency (Coley & Medeiros, 2007). Moreover, evidence for Bell’s theory (1968), which assumes that parents adapt their behavior when children do not show behavior within parental standards, is limited. Aside from one study, which suggested that an increase in adolescents’ sexual risk behavior was related to an increase in paternal knowledge 1 year later (Coley et al., 2009), most studies did not find that externalizing behavior predicted changes in parenting related to behavioral control at the withinfamily level (e.g., Besemer et al., 2016; Cox et al., 2018). Thus, only a few studies have examined reciprocal time-lagged associations but did not provide strong evidence for the hypothesized reinforcing cycles of mutual influence in well-known theories, leaving the direction of the effects an open question for further research.
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