BOSTON – Positive parenting practices can minimize the impact that negative peer influence has on early-maturing girls and thus can reduce the risk of externalizing problems, results of a study have shown.
For this reason, psychosocial interventions targeting at-risk girls should focus on the parent-family relationship, Sylvie Mrug, Ph.D., reported in a poster presentation at a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Previous studies have shown that early puberty in girls predicts disruptive behavior, delinquency, and earlier initiation of substance use, and that psychological immaturity and affiliations with older, more deviant peers exacerbate these problems, said Dr. Mrug of the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
To determine the degree to which parenting practices buffer or amplify these effects of early puberty, Dr. Mrug and colleagues analyzed data on 330 fifth grade girls from the three metropolitan areas who participated in phase I of Healthy Passages, a multisite longitudinal study of adolescent health and behavior. The mean age of the girls in the study was 11.25 years. Thirty-nine percent were African American, 35% were Hispanic, and 19% were white; the remaining participants were other ethnicities.
Outcome measures included onset of menarche; caregiver-reported parental monitoring; self-reported aggression (physical, nonphysical, relational); delinquency (fighting, running away from home, truancy); maternal nurturance; and communication with parents about anger, aggression, smoking, puberty, and sex.
As in previous studies, significant, independent associations were observed between early maturation and delinquency plus all three types of aggression, according to Dr. Mrug. The results of multiple hierarchical regression analyses showed that parental monitoring, maternal nurturance, and effective communication each moderated this link.
“Early maturation predicted delinquency at low levels of monitoring, but not when parental monitoring was high,” Dr. Mrug said. “Early maturation predicted higher levels of aggression only when combined with low levels of nurturance, and [early maturation] predicted higher levels of aggression only when girls reported lower levels of parental communication,” she said.
From these results, “we can conclude that positive parenting offers some protection against the various externalizing problems associated with early puberty in girls,” said Dr. Mrug. It's possible that parental monitoring may limit affiliations with more deviant peers and opportunities for delinquent behavior, and that parental nurturance and communication “may improve coping and refusal skills, and thus decrease susceptibility to negative peer influence.”
Interventions that promote and encourage open communication with parents as well as those that foster greater parental involvement are likely to be most successful, Dr. Mrug suggested.