1 General introduction 9 adolescents is understood to be a heterogeneous phenomenon (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Grusec, 2008), there are likely no universal parenting instructions that will work for every family. Therefore, to help every parent effectively promote the development of their unique adolescent, it is vital to understand how and why parents and adolescents influence each other over time in heterogeneous ways across families. Despite the strong theoretical focus and common knowledge that families function in heterogeneous ways, until recently, empirical studies have mostly been dedicated to identifying general parenting principles or patterns (for a review see Chapter 2; Boele et al., 2020). In doing so, parenting science has established a solid understanding of how families differ in their stable levels of parenting and adolescent functioning. To illustrate, studies have frequently shown that adolescents who experience relatively high levels of parental warmth exhibit fewer internalizing and externalizing problems than adolescents who experience less parental warmth (Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b). However, such grouplevel patterns provide little to no information on how the dynamic processes between parenting and an adolescent’s functioning unfold over time within the same family (Hamaker, 2012; Molenaar, 2004), let alone how such dynamic parenting processes differ from one family to the next. Therefore, parenting science is still in its infancy in understanding the complexities of parenting adolescents: (I) how parents and adolescents influence each other within families, (II) on micro- to macro-timescales, and (III) how and why these influences might vary across families. To address these three pressing knowledge gaps, the overarching goal of this dissertation was to provide insights into the complexities of parenting adolescents across timescales and families. To achieve this goal, this dissertation presents five studies (one systematic review and four empirical studies) that examined how key dimensions of parenting are reciprocally linked to adolescent functioning within families on various timescales and how and why these linkages differ across families. The empirically studied key parenting dimensions are warmth, autonomy support, behavioral control, and psychological control, which will be explained later in this introduction. The empirically studied domains of adolescent functioning include aspects of psychological (i.e., depressive and anxiety symptoms and self-esteem) and affective functioning (i.e., positive and negative affect). In this chapter, I elaborate on the contemporary theoretical understanding of parenting adolescents and how generally applied methods have had a mismatch with these theoretical ideas (Richters, 1997, 2021). I end with the aims, which address the methodological gaps and outline of this dissertation.
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