Perceptions of Efficacy and Legitimacy of Parental Influence Techniques by Children and Early Adolescents

Age-related differences in behavioral expectations, attributions, and evaluations have long been considered factors in parent-child relationships uring the transition to adolescence, but little is known about such differences. In a two-phase procedure, 217 second, fifth, and eighth grade males and females were first asked to predict parental efficacy in twelve stories depicting one of three different parental strategies for gaining children's compliance: power assertion, laissez faire behavior, and induction. The measure also included scales for attributions for each story child's compliance and for evaluations of both parent and child characters. Second, a random subsample of the subjects (N = 66) were interviewed individually to assess perceptions of story characters, story events and correspondence between story and actual parent-child interactions. Fifth and eighth graders rated child's compliance as more likely in both induction and power assertion stories than in laissez faire stories, but second graders did not discriminate among the three influence methods. Eighth graders rated parent characters in the power assertion stories less favorably than in induction stories. Predicted differences between preadolescents' and adolescents' reactions to fictional parental behavior were more pronounced in evaluations of story characters than in behavioral predictions and causal attributions.