engleski

Adolescents’ wellbeing in face of economic hardship: are parents still important?

From the 1990’s the Republic of Croatia crossed the way of socialist economy and war to a free- market economy and protecting women and children rights. Unfortunately, the growth of economy and prosperity after the war was not straight- forward, but interrupted with financial crisis in 2008 that Croatia has still not fully recovered from. The unemployment rate has increased compared to the period before, especially in the east and central Croatia, and a large number of parents are exposed to high levels of stress and material insecurity. According to Conger’s Family stress model (1994), economic hardship is strongly linked to inadequate parental practices and to the adolescents’ outcomes in whole. In that model, authors emphasize parental perception of economic status, whereby we are interested in children’s perception. We were interested to see how financial and parental characteristics predict adolescents' well-being. The research was conducted in 2016 on a two-part disproportionately stratified cluster sample of 944 first grade high school students from six counties of central Croatia. In this paper we used the following measures: measures of socio- economic characteristics (gender, perception of family financial status, perception of the housing condition), parental monitoring (Silverberg i Small, 1991) and parents’ psychological aggression (Ajduković, Sušac i Rajhvajn Bulat, 2016), adolescents’ well-being (Rees, Goswami i Bradshaw, 2010). Multiple regression model was used to determine the effects of socio-economic characteristics, parental monitoring and parents’ psychological aggression on Croatian adolescents’ well-being. Model explained 33, 7% of criterion, socio- economic characteristics explaining 22, 3%, and parental control and parents’ psychological aggression explaining 11, 4% of adolescents’ well-being. Findings indicate that context variables were more important predictors of adolescents' well-being. The implications of findings underline importance of studying social context variables of children's environment regarding the adolescents’ well-being and encouraging social policies to focus on interaction between children and social context.

economic hardship, parental monitoring, adolescence

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