Adolescents Who Are Less Religious than Their Parents Are at Risk for Externalizing and Internalizing Symptoms: the Mediating Role of Parent-adolescent Relationship Quality Nih Public Access

Parents generally take pains to insure that their children adopt their own religious beliefs and practices, so what happens psychologically to adolescents who find themselves less religious than their parents? We examined the relationships among parents' and adolescents' religiousness, adolescents' ratings of parent-adolescent relationship quality, and adolescents' psychological adjustment using data from 322 adolescents and their parents. Adolescent boys who had lower organizational and personal religiousness than their parents, and girls who had lower personal religiousness than their parents, had more internalizing and externalizing psychological symptoms than did adolescents whose religiousness better matched their parents'. The apparent effects of sub-parental religiousness on adolescents' psychological symptoms were mediated by their intermediate effects on adolescents' ratings of the quality of their relationships with their parents. These findings identify religious discrepancies between parents and their children as an important influence on the quality of parent-adolescent relationships, with important implications for adolescents' psychological well-being. Religion can play important roles in the psychological well-being of adolescents and the functioning of their families. Adolescent religiousness is associated with protection from many negative outcomes, including internalizing problems such as depression For example, mothers' views of the importance of religion has a strong positive association with both mothers' and children's reports of mother-child relationship quality (Pearce & Axinn, 1998), and adolescents who attend church tend to report more involvement in, and satisfaction with, their families (Smith, 2003). Parental religiousness is also positively related to warm and supportive parenting behaviors and effective monitoring However, research on the associations of religiousness with adolescent outcomes has largely overlooked a fundamental fact about adolescents and their religious beliefs: When adolescents become more (or less) religious, these personal changes often create discrepancies between the adolescents' and their parents' endorsement of cherished beliefs and engagement in personally meaningful practices. These discrepancies may be equally or perhaps even more potent in predicting adolescent maladjustment than are parents' and adolescents' mean levels of religiousness. That is, discrepancies in religiousness may negatively affect relationship quality between adolescents and their parents, which in turn is associated with adolescent maladjustment. Indeed, research suggests that, among young adults, when a mother and her child place similar degrees of importance on religion, they report higher-quality affective relations (Pearce & Axinn, 1998). Conversely, adolescents who ascribe less importance to religion than their parents report less affection toward parents compared with adolescents who ascribe the same importance to religion as their parents (Stokes …