ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on adolescents’ relationships with their parents and describes the different types of autonomous functioning within that particular context, their ramifications for adolescent adjustment, and their intercorrelations. Cognitive autonomy involves a subjective sense of control over one’s life. One key criterion is that judgments and choices are derived from one’s own individually held principles, rather than from the expectations of others. Meta-analysis revealed that the presumed inverted U-curve did not adequately describe age-related changes in parent-adolescent conflict. Socio-cognitive theories, which focus on parents’ beliefs and expectations regarding their children’s development figure prominently among such accounts. Adolescents accept parental authority as legitimate in both the moral and conventional domains and parent-adolescent conflicts rarely emerge over issues that pertain to those domains. Adolescents with higher scores for emotional separation from parents are more involved in all sorts of problem behaviour.
