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Perceived Financial Difficulties and Adolescents’ Well-being: The Role of Parental Monitoring

According to Conger’s Family stress model (1994), economic hardship is linked to inadequate parental practices and the adolescents’ outcomes in whole. The Relationship between economic hardship and the adolescents’ outcomes was even stronger when economic hardship was defined through adolescents’ perception of financial difficulties. As a part of the Family stress model, several resilience factors can be examined, such as parental monitoring. Parental monitoring refers to the set of parenting behaviours including attention and tracking of the child’s whereabouts, activities and adaptations. It is correlated with several internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence, but its relationship with measures of adolescents’ life satisfaction was rarely researched. The aim of this study was to explore the role of adolescents’ perception of economic hardship in predicting adolescents’ well-being with a special focus to parental monitoring. The research was conducted as a part of a project titled “Family economic hardship, psychosocial problems and educational outcomes of adolescents in the time of economic crisis”, fully supported by the Croatian Science Foundation. The two-stage stratified cluster sample from six counties in Croatia that differ in indicators of economic development was used. The participants were 975 students in the first grade of secondary school (Mage=15.17, SDage=0.495). The following measures of individual characteristics of adolescents (gender, secondary school program, urban/rural area, comparison of financial and housing family status), Adolescents’ Perception of Financial Status Scale (Rajhvajn Bulat, Ajduković i Sušac, 2016), Parental Monitoring Scale (Silverberg i Small, 1991) and Student’s Life Satisfaction (Rees, Goswami i Bradshaw, 2010) were used. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the complete model explained 28.4% of the adolescents' well-being, whereas individual characteristics of adolescents explained 4.3%, perceived financial difficulties 17.5% and the parental monitoring 10.9% of the criterion. Mediational analysis showed that the effects of perceived financial difficulties on adolescents' well-being were partially mediated by parental monitoring. Findings indicate the important role of parental monitoring in relationship between perceived financial difficulties and adolescents’ well-being and encourage focusing on the role of parental monitoring in prevention and intervention programs.

perceived financial difficulties, parental monitoring, well-being, resilience, adolescence

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