Parental Monitoring, Parental Knowledge, and the Occurrence of Potentially Traumatic Events in Adolescence

Parental monitoring and knowledge of their teens’ activities might enable parents to keep teens safe, reducing the risk of potentially traumatic events. This paper investigated that possibility using a large, nationwide sample of 11,880 early adolescent teens followed longitudinally from ages 10-11 to 13-14 years old. At annual assessments, teens completed measures of parental monitoring/knowledge and of potentially traumatic events. Data were analyzed using multilevel models to separate between- and within-family associations. Because within-family associations cannot be explained by the many systematic differences between families with low vs. high monitoring, they comprise more rigorous evidence of a potential causal relationship. We tested both concurrent associations between monitoring/knowledge and PTEs and prospective associations over 12 months. At the between-family level, every tested association was significant (p<.001): greater monitoring/knowledge predicted fewer PTEs. However, at the within-family level, few associations were significant. Greater knowledge (p=0.005) or combined monitoring/knowledge (p=0.01) predicted fewer PTEs concurrently, but greater monitoring alone did not (p=0.14). No prospective within-family associations were statistically significant. We replicated this pattern of findings in a different set of observations from the same sample, using different measures of each construct. We conclude that most of the apparent association between parental monitoring/knowledge and PTEs is explained by confounding factors, rather than a causal relationship. However, we found some evidence supporting a causal link in models of concurrent associations, suggesting any causal relationship between monitoring/knowledge and PTEs may unfold over shorter timescales.