Adolescents learn to manipulate their parents following a divorce or separation, gaining more control of their situation in a two-household family, says a new study from Ball State University.
Intensive interviews with 50 adolescents found the majority actively interpret their parents’ behaviors in order to manage relationships to their perceived advantage.
“There is a perception that after a divorce or separation parents are active and children passive in their relationships,” said Chad Menning, a sociology professor who conducted the study. “We found the opposite to be true. Adolescents are not passive.
“Adolescents after divorce or separation do not simply absorb parental resources as sponges absorb water,” he said. “Rather, they gather and interpret information about their parents, dodge questions, engineer images of themselves, parry parents’ probes, maneuver between households, and cut ties with parents in efforts to exert their own authority and to secure their individual identities.”
Menning found several strategies, including:
• Withholding information from one parent to avoid punishment or to solidify a relationship. In many families following a divorce or separation, there is less communication between parents, allowing the child to gain an upper hand by controlling the information flow.
• Moving from one home to another to gain control. Children will often move into the home of the parent who is less controlling in order to punish the other parent or to escape a situation they do not like.
• Cutting one parent completely out of his or her life. Also known as adolescent initiated separation, the process allows the adolescent to control when and where they have contact with one of the parents.
“None of these options would be open to a child in a single household with two parents,” Menning said. “Parents talk and form a team to raise a child. Separate the two parents and the child can use the situation to play one off the other.
“Adolescents would have to run away from a two-parent home to gain control,” he said. “However, they would then lose the security of their home. These children don’t want to lose that comfort zone even though they want more independence and control.”
These tendencies were uncovered when Menning conducted two-hour interviews with each adolescent as part of a research study of the effects of divorce and separation on families. His continuing research is being funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
During the interviews, Menning realized that many of the adolescents were uneasy about discussing relationships with their parents.
“At times it was very difficult to get the kids to discuss their situations because they had to talk about their strategies,” he said. “They thought what they were doing was a really big secret. Maybe they were thinking that no one else was doing such things.”
- Ball State University
Articles in The Science of Mental Health are written by the originating institution. This article was originally posted to Newswise.
