Parental monitoring in African American, single mother-headed families. An Ecological approach to the identification of predictors.

Parental monitoring is considered an essential parenting skill. Despite its relevance to a range of child and adolescent outcomes, including the prevention of conduct problems and substance use, there has been little empirical attention devoted to examining the antecedents of parental monitoring. Building on Brofenbrenner's ecological model, this study examined the association between the ecological context in which families reside and parental monitoring across two waves of data separated by 15 months. Findings were consistent across increasingly conservative sets of hierarchical multiple regression analyses. Whether the neighborhood was rural or urban and the level of maternal depressive symptoms predicted parental-monitoring behavior concurrently and longitudinally as well as change in parental monitoring over time. Monitoring increased over the 15-month interval more in urban areas than rural areas and among mothers with lower levels of depressive symptoms. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.