Adolescent-Perceived Maternal Responses to Their Negative Emotions Predict Adolescents' Willingness to Share Emotional Distress With Mothers: A Cross-Lagged Panel Network Model

Abstract

The open communication about adolescents' emotions between parents and adolescents is pivotal, as it helps adolescents to understand and manage emotional experiences. Utilizing longitudinal data, we aimed to explore whether maternal supportive or nonsupportive responses to adolescents' negative emotions could predict the communication patterns of adolescents' emotional distress (CPAED) between parents and adolescents. Two hundred Chinese adolescents (65.5% boys, M_age = 14.17 years) completed an online survey in March 2022 (Time 1), and 157 of them (66.2% boys, M_age = 15.17 years) completed the survey again in April 2022 (Time 2) after a 5-week COVID-19-induced home confinement with parents. Results with the Cross-Lagged Panel Network (CLPN) Model showed that adolescent-perceived supportive responses predicted later more active and reactive emotion sharing and predicted less problematic CPAED, such as lack of solicitation by mothers and lack of responses by adolescents. Conversely, nonsupportive responses predicted more problematic CPAED over time. The centrality analyses indicated that across the 5-week interval, the maternal supportive responses may have a stronger predictive role on CPAED than nonsupportive responses. This study underscores the necessity for parents to engage in supportive emotional socialization practices to promote healthy emotional communication in adolescent–mother dyads.