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Parental Monitoring of Adolescents: Current Perspectives for Researchers and Practitioners resources

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xiv Introduction monitoring, our goals were to (a) provide a current perspective on what we know about parental monitoring, (b) identify areas where research still needs to be pursued, (c) provide a sense of the types of research programs being conducted by leading experts in the fi eld, (d) highlight the theories and meth- ods used in parental monitoring research, and (e) address the applied impli- cations of research on parental monitoring. The book has been designed to make contributions at the conceptual, methodological, and practical levels and is divided into two parts. Part I addresses existing gaps in the monitoring literature from each contribu- tor’s area of expertise within the fi eld of parental monitoring. Part II pres- ents contributors’ responses to a set of six questions that were posed to each team of authors, as well as a synthesis of these responses. A common theme across the chapters is the need to refi ne the study of parental moni- toring. Whereas past research has conceptualized parental monitoring pri- marily as parental knowledge about children’s activities, whereabouts, and companions, the chapters here view monitoring in the broader context of the parent-adolescent relationship and the social realities that families contend with as part of their daily lives. In doing so, the authors address a number of issues fundamental to a contextual study of parental monitoring, including how best to defi ne and measure parental monitoring, how paren- tal monitoring works in the dynamics of the parent-adolescent relationship, how parental monitoring varies across childhood, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood, how parental monitoring manifests in diverse fam- ilies throughout the world, and how parental monitoring can best be tar- geted in parent-based interventions designed to keep children, adolescents, and young adults safe from harm. In our own work as scholars of parental monitoring, we have considered the state of parental monitoring research and have attempted to address these fundamental issues via the introduction of a conceptual framework of parental monitoring (chapter 7). In addition to addressing fundamental is- sues in the monitoring literature, this chapter also seeks to contextualize many of the issues raised in chapters 1–6 by introducing a framework of parental monitoring that can not only be applied to diverse populations across time but also has implications for the development of applied moni- toring interventions. Specifi cally, three core processes of parental monitor- ing are discussed: (a) parental behavioral expectations (i.e., how a parent ex- pects the child to behave and the clarity with which these expectations are conveyed to adolescents), (b) parental behavioral monitoring (i.e., how a parent

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