Relationships between Parenting Strategies and Teens’ Exposure to Risky Contexts

Teens' greater unsupervised freedom to explore new environments could increase exposure to contextual risks, such as social disorganization and alcohol outlets, increasing potential for alcohol and other drug (AOD) use and problem behavior. Parenting strategies may be protective in reducing such exposure. Prior studies show relations to reduced teen AOD use. Specifically, general parental monitoring (Bohnert et al., 2012; Byrnes et al. 2011; Fulkerson et al., 2008) and AOD-specific monitoring (Van der Vorst et al., 2005) are associated with lower AOD use and delinquency. Parent-teen communication both in general (Luk et al., 2010; Tobler & Komro, 2010) and AOD-specific are related to less AOD use (Huansuriya et al., 2014; Mares et al., 2011). However, it is unknown if these parenting strategies are protective for reducing teens’ exposure to contextual risks during daily travels. We examined relations between parenting strategies, teen travel patterns and contextual risk exposure.

Teens (N=206) aged 14-16 (60.2% female) carried GPS-enabled smartphones for one month per year over two years, during which their locations were tracked. Activity spaces were created for each participant by connecting GPS points in time order and adding a spatial buffer (100m) around their multiday route, excluding the home. Parenting indicators were obtained from two waves’ annual surveys (i.e., parental rules, knowledge of teens’ activities, AOD-specific monitoring, general communication, AOD-specific communication). Teens’ perceived location characteristics were averaged across approximately 24 text-message based Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) within each wave (e.g., how safe they felt at their location, whether alcohol outlets are visible). Teens’ cumulative exposure to disorganization in their activity spaces was computed from locations data collected across approximately 30 days per wave (e.g., time-weighted neighborhood disorganization index while away from home, numbers of alcohol outlets within 100m). Hierarchical Tobit models estimated influences of parenting characteristics and demographic covariates on six disorder measures across 322 wave-specific observations with complete information nested within 206 respondents.

Parental knowledge of teens’ activities was associated with less perceived exposure to disorganization and alcohol outlets. General parent-teen communication was related to reduced perceived exposure to disorganization. In contrast, more frequent parent-teen communications regarding AOD were related to increased exposure to alcohol outlets. Findings have implications for prevention strategies, and reflect the complexity of parent-teen communications as a parental focus on reducing teen risky behaviors and exposure to risky contexts.