Family Relationships During Adolescence

Abstract

This chapter reviews how patterns of family communication are transformed across adolescence, thereby focusing on three key aspects of parent-adolescent and sibling relationships: closeness, conflict, and control. Family communication must change to meet adolescents’ increasing need for autonomy. Most families maintain close and warm relationships across adolescence, despite a modest decline in closeness and an increase in expressions of anger and coercion. This modest uptick in conflict and decline in closeness may help renegotiate expectations and responsibilities and accommodate adolescents’ need for autonomy. However, families with preexisting communication problems tend to have difficulty realigning the relationships, releasing control, and establishing new forms of closeness and may face dysfunctional discord during adolescence. Youth who have better-quality relationships with parents also tend to have better-quality relationships with siblings, and typically grow up in families with high-quality interparental relationships. The advent of new longitudinal methodologies facilitates the study of short-term and long-term within-family processes, offering a better understanding of why most family dyads are able to balance conflict, closeness, and information management in this period of relationship transformation, whereas other families are not.