"It's my own business!": Parental control over personal issues in the context of everyday adolescent-parent conflicts and internalizing disorders among urban Chinese adolescents.

This study with 198 urban Chinese adolescents ( age = 16.0, = 1.46) and their parents investigated the impact of parental control over personal issues in the context of everyday conflicts and adolescent self-reports of internalizing disorders as measured by the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). Adolescents and parents completed the Parental Authority Index (PAI) assessing perceptions of parental control over personal, prudential-conventional, and overlapping issues. Adolescents recorded daily conflicts with parents over 2 weeks on private blogs through an online platform. Significant relationships were found between adolescent BSI scores for internalizing disorders (anxiety, somatization, interpersonal sensitivity) and their scores on the PAI for perceptions of parental control over personal issues as well as actions that overlapped personal with conventional and prudential considerations. Blog data revealed that two thirds of these urban Chinese parent-adolescent conflicts were about regulation of adolescent daily activities and issues directly impacting adolescent personal choice. Adolescents considered the majority of these conflicts as personal issues, and those who reported perceiving a higher level of parental control over their personal issues had significantly more daily conflicts with their parents. In addition, significant associations were found between reported actual daily conflicts and adolescent internalizing disorders: The greater the intensity of conflicts as experienced by the adolescents, the higher adolescents scored on the BSI subscale for depression; the less fair adolescents rated the conflict resolution and the less positively they felt about the process that led to the outcome, the higher they scored on the BSI subscales for interpersonal sensitivity and depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).