Parental Rule Socialization for Preventive Health and Adolescent Rule Compliance

This study examined family rules about nutrition, exercise, and sun protection in 164 parent - young adult children dyads. Both parents and their young adult children independently reported on health rules that they perceived throughout their child's adolescent years and the extent to which the rules were articulated, violations sanctioned, and modeled. Neither child nor parent perceptions of rule-related communication during adolescence predicted current young adult behaviors for any of the 3 health domains. Perceived rule compliance during adolescence was predicted from rule articulation across health domains, whereas patterns for sanctioning and parental modeling varied by health domain. Parents reported higher rule articulation than was perceived by their children across health domains and selectively reported higher scores on both sanctioning and modeling. Key Words: exercise, family communication, nutrition, preventive health, sun protection. Adolescence is a critical time for establishing healthy behaviors that affect current health and decrease the risk of adult onset chronic disease. A great deal of effort has gone into decreasing risky health behaviors, such as alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, as well as unsafe sexual behaviors. Less attention is, however, paid to increasing health-promoting behaviors. Three specific adolescent health behaviors that can have a significant impact on future health include nutrition, exercise, and sun protection. The purpose of the present study is to examine the perceptions of parents and their young adult children with respect to how parental social control through communication about family rules during the child's adolescence in these three health domains predicts rule compliance by the child during adolescence and currently. Good nutrition and exercise can alleviate the health risk of children being overweight, thus improving adolescent health (Rosenbloom, Joe, Young, & Winter, 1999) and decreasing the risk of adulthood obesity (Ferrara, Thorpe, & Wilkinson, 2003), which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, and arthritis (Mokdad etat., 2003). Current statistics regarding adolescents' nutrition and exercise behaviors demonstrate much room for improvement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2006), just 20% of high school students eat five servings of fruits and vegetables, and only 16.2% drink three or more glasses of milk per day; 64% do not meet the recommended levels of physical activity. Sun protection behaviors, particularly during adolescence, are critical to the prevention of skin cancer because 25% - 50% of a person's lifetime UV exposure happens during adolescence and childhood (Dadlani, 2008; Saraiya et al., 2004). Exposure to the sun is a major risk factor for developing skin cancer (CDC, 2008), and sunburns during adolescence and childhood are associated with the development of melanoma, the most deadly skin cancer, and basal cell carcinoma (Gallagher et al., 1995; Whiteman & Green, 1994). Routine sun protection on sunny days is, however, practiced by less than one third of U.S. youth (Cokkinides et al., 2001). In 2004, 69% of youth reported having one or more sunburns in the past summer (Cokkinides et al., 2006). Nutrition, exercise, and sun protection are health-promoting behaviors that can have a positive impact on adolescents' current and future health. Adolescence is also a period of time when children are moving away from their dependence on parents and establishing their own identities. As such, adolescents are vulnerable to developing poor health behaviors that put them at risk (King & Klawitter, 2007). Few studies have examined the potential of parental influence on adolescents' healthpromoting behaviors, although there is a substantial literature on parental influences on children's nutrition (e.g., Clark, Goyder, Bissell, Blank, & Peters, 2007). …