As adolescents grow up, one of the important developmental tasks is to individuate themselves and to become more autonomous from parents. This requires a realignment of the parent-adolescent communication. The current meta-analytic study aims at identifying developmental changes in parent-adolescent communication, conceptualized within the parental monitoring framework, as entailing parental solicitation, control and knowledge, and adolescent's disclosure and secrecy. Thirty-one longitudinal studies published between 2000 and 2015 were identified and included in the current meta-analysis. Informants, age at assessment and study duration were tested as moderators. Results showed a low to medium normative decline in parental control (Cohen's d =-.395, 95% CI [-.541,-.249]), knowledge (d =-.245,95% CI [-.331,-.160] and adolescence disclosure (d =-.147, 95% CI [-.204,-.090]), and an increase in adolescent's secrecy (d = .194, CI [031, .356]). Parental solicitation decreased based on parents' (d =-0.242, 95% CI[-0.376,-0.109]) but not on adolescents' reports (d = 0.038, 95% CI[-0.099, 0.175]). Another significant moderator was the duration of the study, with studies longer than 2 years being able to detect a more pronounced change in parental control than studies lasting less than 2 years (≤ 2 years, d=-0.139 vs. duration > 2 years, d=-0.581). Limitations of the current knowledge and new direction of studies are discussed.

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Introduction: The aim of the current study was to evaluate the factor structure of the CArtes- Modèles Individuels de Relations (CA-MIR), a self-report questionnaire designed to tap into the relational strategies of adults that was developed by a French-speaking research group coordinated by Blaise Pierrehumbert. The CA-MIR's particular merit lies in the richness and complexity of the theoretical model underpinning it. However, to date, this model has only been partially reproduced in studies using exploratory analysis and has never been tested via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).Objective and Method: We thus conducted CFA on data collected from a sample of 979 subjects, recruited using a snowball sampling method during the spring and fall of 2005. To assess if some item multidimensionality was present, we estimated both the independent clusters model (ICM-CFA) and a model in which some zero loading restrictions were removed.Results: The results supported the originally proposed structure of the CA-MIR; the large majority of items were good indicators of the expected latent dimensions and only few items showed relevant secondary loadings or loaded in an unexpected factor. The instrument adequately differentiates the three attachment styles, taking into account both past and present experiences of attachment relationships, and providing a rich and complex assessment of multiple features of attachment. In terms of internal consistency, alpha values were satisfactory and comparable to those found in the original Swiss validation study.Conclusions: Our results are of key importance for both research and clinical work, given the lack of valid and easy-to-administer tools for evaluating adult attachment.

Low agreement between self report and parent report on the behavioral adjustment of adolescents has been widely documented in the literature. However, it has been little studied in connection with adoptees. In the current research, the magnitude of agreement between adolescents and their parents' reports of adolescents' behavioral problems and the direction of the possible discrepancies between these reports are studied. A comparison is made between adopted and non-adopted adolescent-parent dyads. The research questions are tested in a study with a sample size of 784 adolescent-parent pairs (309 adopted and 475 control adolescents) from Belgium, Romania, Chili, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands. Because of an imbalance in the number of adopted and control adolescents per country, a more balanced dataset of 189 adoptees and 104 controls was used in the central analyses. Results showed that both the magnitude of agreement and the direction of the discrepancies in internalizing and externalizing behavioral ratings between informants, i.e. parents and their adolescent, does not depend on the adolescent's status, i.e. adopted or non-adopted. Compared to their parents, both adopted and control adolescents reported problems more frequently.Slight variations in the magnitude of agreement were found between countries. An interaction effect between gender and informant indicated that discrepancies for internalizing behavior were higher in parent-adolescent daughter than in parent-adolescent son pairs.

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