Abstract
Previous findings have shown both beneficial and adverse effects of parents’ attempts to influence adolescents’ eating habits. The current study examined the differential effect of parents’ persuasion (e.g., encouragement, giving information) and pressure tactics (e.g., guilt induction, ridicule) and the moderating influence of parental warmth on older adolescents’ emotional and behavioral responses. An ethnically diverse sample of 336 older adolescents (M age = 18.6; SD = 1.1; 58.0% female) were surveyed. Adolescents who reported higher levels of pressure tactics by parents reported more negative affect and behavioral resistance. Perceived parental warmth moderated the influence of persuasion tactics, but not pressure tactics. For adolescents with low parental warmth, high levels of persuasion were associated with more negative emotional and behavioral responses; persuasion had the opposite associations for adolescents with high parental warmth. These results suggest that parental warmth plays an important role in how older adolescents respond to parents’ persuasion tactics. However, when parents use more forceful pressure tactics to influence eating habits, adolescents react negatively regardless of the overall quality of the parent–adolescent relationship.
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Notes
Although ethnicity had no main effects on emotional or behavioral reactions to persuasion or pressure tactics, it was possible that the associations among the main variables of interest varied between specific ethnic groups. In order to assess this possibility, we ran a series of multi-group analyses in order to examine the fit of the multiple regression models across the three largest ethnic groups in our sample (East Asian, Latino, Caucasian). For the regression model predicting negative affect in response to persuasion tactics, the model constraining the three ethnic groups to have identical covariances and regression weights was an adequate fit to the data, χ2 (43) = 66.2, p < .05, RMSEA = .05 [.02–.07], CFI = .91. Similarly, for the regression model predicting behavioral resistance in response to persuasion tactics, the model was an adequate fit to the data, χ2 (43) = 50.6, ns, RMSEA = .03 [.00–.05], CFI = .97. For the regression models predicting reactions to pressure tactics, the models were not an adequate fit to the data. Specifically, in the regression of negative affect in response to pressure tactics, the model was a poor fit to the data, χ2(41) = 80.7, p < .001, RMSEA = .06 [.04–.08], CFI = .81, as was the case in the regression of behavioral resistance to pressure tactics, χ2(43) = 82.5, p < .001, RMSEA = .06 [.04–.08], CFI = .79. In both models, unconstraining the covariance between pressure tactics and the pressure tactics × parental warmth interaction term resulted in models that were an adequate fit to the data, χ2 (41) = 58.7, p < .05, RMSEA = .04 [.01–.06], CFI = .91, and χ2 (41) = 60.4, p < .05, RMSEA = .04 [.02–.06], CFI = .90, respectively. Overall, these results suggest that the regression results adequately describe the relationship between the variables of interest in all three of these ethnic groups.
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Lessard, J., Greenberger, E. & Chen, C. Adolescents’ Response to Parental Efforts to Influence Eating Habits: When Parental Warmth Matters. J Youth Adolescence 39, 73–83 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9376-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9376-6