Mother-Adolescent Discrepancies in Ratings of Adolescents' Adjustment: Associations with Maternal Mental Health and Family Factors.
Marya Rana, Erin Delker, Patricia East and 4 others
PMID 33165239WHAT IT FOUND
Maternal mental health symptoms were associated with larger mother-adolescent rating differences for adolescents' withdrawn, anxious, depressed, or physical complaint problems.
No such link was seen for externalizing problems, and family factors did not explain the differences.
Key findings
01Mothers generally rated adolescents' withdrawn-depressed, anxious-depressed, and somatic problems higher than adolescents rated themselves, while adolescents generally rated attention, externalizing, aggression, and rule-breaking problems higher than mothers.
02Maternal mental health symptoms were consistently associated with larger mother-adolescent discrepancies for adolescents' internalizing problems, including withdrawn-depressed, anxious-depressed, and somatic complaints.
03Family factors were not significantly associated with mother-adolescent discrepancy scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
No ratings from fathers, teachers, or other informants were available, and there were no clinical interviews or behavioral observations, so the study cannot say which mother-adolescent disagreement was more accurate. The data were cross-sectional, so they cannot show whether maternal mental health symptoms changed how mothers reported adolescent problems, or whether reporting differences were related to later maternal mental health. The sample came from a specific longitudinal community study in Chile, so the findings may not apply to other settings or populations. Analyses used only items that were identical between the mother and adolescent forms, not the full Child Behavior Checklist or Youth Self-Report.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the discrepancy as proof that adolescents underreport emotional problems. The study cannot determine which rating is more accurate, and it cannot show that maternal mental health symptoms caused the difference.