Relationship Quality, Parenting Practices, and Adolescent Mental Health Across Diverse U.S. Populations

Abstract

Various parenting practices and behaviors have been consistently linked to children and youth’s mental health outcomes (Pinquart, 2016, 2017) through identified psychological and biological mechanisms (Hoeve et al., 2009). The quality of the dyadic parent–child relationship is less commonly studied but may be important in mediating the efficacy of parenting practices and understanding cultural differences in how parenting practices affect development outcomes (Ho et al., 2008; Lansford, 2022). To explore these issues, we fielded a questionnaire through a probability-based sample provided by Gallup, collecting data from 6,643 U.S. parents and 1,580 teenagers. In a series of separate exploratory factor analyses, we identified racial/ethnic group-specific constructs of parenting practices and relationship quality. Using the groupspecific factor structures for parenting practices and parent–child relationship quality, we find a large effect of perceived parent–child relationship quality on adolescent mental health. In combination with adverse childhood experiences and parenting practices, parent–child relationship quality explains at least 34% of the variation in adolescent mental health in each group; the association is just as strong for nonbiological parent–child dyads as for biological and falls only slightly after adjusting for evocative effects. We replicate the finding that effective parenting practices—summarized by responsiveness and demandingness—predict better mental health, but importantly, we find that most of the effect is indirect through better perceived relationship quality. Our findings inform future research exploring more complex causal pathways between parenting and youth development in different cultural contexts and inform the work of clinicians and service providers working with diverse groups of families.