Adolescent‐parent conflict was examined in 120 lower‐class Chinese early, mid‐, and late adolescents in Hong Kong. Individually interviewed adolescents described actual family conflicts, rated their frequency and intensity, justified their own and their parents' perspective on disputes, described how conflicts were resolved, and rated their parents' parenting styles. Conflicts were primarily with mothers, of moderate frequency and severity, and occurred over everyday issues. Chinese adolescents reasoned about conflicts primarily in terms of personal jurisdiction; personal reasoning decreased with age and was more frequent among males than females. Parents' reasoning was seen as primarily pragmatic. Adolescents wanted greater autonomy in decision making than their parents granted them, but parents' views prevailed less with age. Chinese parents were described as relatively warm and controlling; greater parental control and lower warmth were significantly related to conflict frequency and intensity. The findings are seen as reflecting autonomy development in a different cultural context.

Sixty-one Chinese preschoolers from Hong Kong at 2 ages (Ms = 4.36 and 6.00 years) were interviewed about familiar moral, social-conventional, and personal events. Children treated personal events as distinct from moral obligations and conventional regulations. Children judged the child as deciding personal issues, based on personal choice justifications, whereas children judged parents as deciding moral and conventional issues. With age, children granted increased decision-making power to the child. In contrast, children viewed moral transgressions as more serious, generalizably wrong, and wrong independent of authority than other events, based on welfare and fairness. Punishment-avoidance justifications for conventional events decreased with age, whereas conventional justifications increased. Young Chinese preschool children make increasingly differentiated judgments about their social world.

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This study examined adolescent-parent conflict among 188 5th-, 7th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade Chinese adolescents, 93 from Hong Kong and 95 from Shenzhen, PRC. Individually interviewed Chinese adolescents reported disagreements with parents over everyday issues, primarily choice of activities, schoolwork, interpersonal relationships, and chores. Conflicts were relatively few in number, moderate in frequency, and mild in intensity, and across contexts, conflicts were more intense in early adolescence (5th and 7th grades) than in late adolescence (12th grade). There were more conflicts over chores and interpersonal relationships in Hong Kong than in Shenzhen and more conflicts over schoolwork in Shenzhen than in Hong Kong, particularly among 7th and 12th graders. As expected, adolescents primarily justified conflicts, particularly conflicts over choice of activities and homework, by appealing to personal jurisdiction, and across contexts, personal reasoning increased with age. Conflicts were resolved primarily by giving in to parents, although adolescents desired more autonomy in decision making than they reported having. Although adolescent-parent conflict among Chinese youth appears to reflect the development of adolescent autonomy, culturally specific processes influence its expression.

This article examined adolescent-parent conflict in 28 divorced, unremarried mother-custody families and 66 two-parent, married families with 6th-11th graders. Married mothers of early adolescents generated more conflicts than did divorced mothers of early adolescents and married mothers of midadolescents, and adolescents from married families rated conflicts as more serious than did adolescents from divorced families. Early adolescents from married families appealed to maintaining personal jurisdiction more when justifying conflicts and were rated as having more positive communication lhan early adolescents from divorced families. However, affective constraining was greater among midadolescents from married families than from divorced families. In addition, there was a trend toward more harmonious family relationships among divorced families than among married families. Differences in family interactions were obtained both when divorced families were compared with married families observed in triads (mothers, fathers, and adolescents) and dyads (mothers and adolescents).