ABSTRACT
The other papers in this volume have grappled with whether and how researchers can tease apart the child’s role in shaping family interactions and their own development from the parents’ role. They have cited diverse empirical findings to illustrate the conceptual and empirical problems in asking, and the complexity of the answers to the question regarding, whether parents affect children or children affect parents. In this paper, we take a different approach. First, we limit our focus to adolescence. We start with a robust set of correlational findings that researchers have virtually always attributed to parent effects, and we present empirical evidence that those particular findings might have been child effects. We make a circumscribed argument; we do not make the larger argument that parents have no effect on children or that they have played no active role in creating the relationship within which these findings appear. But we argue that directionality in these findings is important in current perspective-regardless of what has led up to them-because researchers have used these findings as a basis for handing out practical advice to parents about how they should parent their adolescents.
