Parenting, Peers and Psychosocial Adjustment: Are the Same-or Different-Children Affected by Each?

The prospective research presented herein extends work on parent and peer effects on adolescent psychosocial adjustment by looking beyond average effects. Instead, it considers variation in susceptibility to each source of influence in order to assess the extent to which those individuals most and least susceptible to parent effects are similarly-or differentially-susceptible to peer effects. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1364, 48.3% female, age range: 10-15 yrs., race/ethnicity: 80.4% white, 12.9% black and 6.7% other) was analyzed to assess the degree to which each child was susceptible to parent and peer effects. Toward this end, an influence statistic, DFBETAS, was used. A significant and moderate positive association between the two susceptibility effects indicated that children most or least susceptible to the effects of quality of parenting proved to be similarly affected by their peers, although this was not the case for a substantial minority of youth. The fact that at least some children vary dramatically in the effects to which they are most susceptible is discussed with respect to potential targets of intervention, namely, parents or peers.