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Symposium Title: Seventh Graders and Their Parents: Friends or Foes? Submission Date: 11/15/2006 Symposium Chair: Sanford L. Braver Submission #: WPAS0010 Your submission number should be used by the participants of this symposium when they are asked to enter the Session Submission Number. Continue to main menu

Adolescence, which often is specified to begin at about 7th grade, is a developmental stage that places notoriously difficult strains on the parent-child relationship. Depending on how parents handle the challenges of this transition, youth can mature and become resilient (i.e., be “friends”), or suffer serious, and sometimes enduring, behavioral difficulties (be “foes”). Research also suggests that relationships with fathers become particularly import at this stage. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research on the processes by which fathering (and mothering) behaviors and parent-child interactions lead to such outcomes. In the present symposium, we address the issue of not whether, but how parent-child relationships are linked to significant affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes, with special attention given to cultural issues. Specifically, every paper in this session examines different mechanisms of how the adolescent’s changing relationship with mother and father (or stepfather) can bring about good or poor child outcomes. The four papers all report findings from the Parents & Youth Study (PAYS), a multi-wave, longitudinal study of approximately 400 Mexican- and Euro-American intact and stepfather families in two locations (Arizona, Southern California). The focus of the project is on adolescents in the critical transition from middle school to high school, and their parents (inclusive of biological mothers, biological fathers, and stepfathers). The papers present the following findings from the project: (1) That better familial relationships, in terms of perceived parental conflict, parental rejection, parental acceptance and poorer parent-child relationship alleviates the impact of perceived racial discrimination in Mexican-American adolescents. (2) That families who had consensus in perceptions of both father-child and mother-child relationships had adolescents with better behavioral outcomes compared to families with discrepant relationship quality ratings. (3) That Mexican-American adolescents feel that they matter significantly less to their fathers than Anglo-American adolescents do and that this appears to be so because Mexican-American adolescents report significantly less of 6 of the 7 paternal behaviors (e.g., “telling you he loves you”) than Anglo-American adolescents. (4)