Maternal socialization in emotional life storytelling with adolescents: Ties to adolescent adjustment and insights for improving measurement

Parents’ emotion socialization behaviors remain important into adolescence, but less work has measured socialization behaviors relative to self-reports involving adolescents. We considered how mothers’ emotion socialization behaviors—captured during family storytelling—could differ given adolescent age and gender and could be linked with measures of adolescent adjustment. We recruited 45 mothers and adolescents (M age = 13.6 years, SD = 1.4; 51.1% girls) to complete conversations about life events and family stories. Adolescents also provided information on their depressive symptoms and social support from the family. Among adolescents who endorsed more depressive symptoms, mothers’ structural, egocentric, and factual communication behaviors were negatively associated with depressive symptoms and positively associated with family support. This provided support for a compensation hypothesis in socialization toward adolescents. Further, findings challenged views about mothers’ egocentric behaviors toward adolescents. We discuss ways parents’ behaviors using themselves as sources of insight for adolescents could be developmentally appropriate.