Mother-Adolescent Discrepancies in Reports of Relationship Quality and Early Adolescent Internalizing Symptoms

Abstract

This 3-wave longitudinal study examined the bidirectional associations between adolescents’ and mothers’ perceptions of the mother-adolescent relationship quality (i.e., warmth and hostility) and internalizing symptoms (i.e., depressive symptoms and loneliness). The focus was on the direction of effects between internalizing symptoms and both the levels of and discrepancies in mothers’ and adolescents’ perceptions of mother-adolescent relationship quality and potential differential associations with depressive symptoms and loneliness over time. A total of 622 early adolescents (55% girls, Mage T1 = 10.77 years, SDage T1 = 0.48, 90.3% Belgian nationality) and 489 mothers (Mage T1 = 40.96, SDage T1 = 3.55) participated in the study. Latent Congruence Models (LCMs) revealed that higher levels of perceived parental hostility in the mother-adolescent relationship were a shared risk factor for both depressive symptoms and loneliness over time. Furthermore, both depressive symptoms and loneliness predicted larger discrepancies in reports of parental hostility over time. In contrast, depressive symptoms were linked to lower levels of perceived parental warmth and larger discrepancies in reports of parental warmth over time, whereas no significant associations between loneliness and warmth were found. Overall, these results revealed consistent patterns of findings across both internalizing symptoms for hostility, whereas depressive symptoms were uniquely associated with both levels and discrepancies in warmth.