The easyness of parent-child communication in adolescence: gender differences and time trends observed in Spain

Abstract

This paper basically tries to answer one question: Do today’s adolescents have greater communication difficulties with their parents than did adolescents from ten or twenty years ago? A sequential cross-sectional design was used to analyse time trends in the ease of parent-child communication in adolescence for the period 1986-2002. To this end, data were collected in four subsequent years (1986, 1990, 1994 and 2002) using representative samples of school children in Spain. The sample comprised 14,578 subjects aged 11, 13, 15 and 17. Girls aged 15 were found to have greater communication difficulties with their fathers in 2002 as compared to 1994, where as among 15-year-old boys the inter-annual evolution in this regard was relatively stable. As regards communication with mothers, 15-year-old boys generally showed greater difficulty in 2002 than in 1994. Among other implications, this may mean that gender differences are becoming more pronounced in communication with parents during adolescence.