Family stressors, emotional competence, and adolescent risky behavior

Adolescent risky behavior is a pressing societal problem given associations with long-term negative outcomes including criminal behaviors, risk for suicide, and adult alcohol dependence. Many common family stressors (e.g., parent depression, inter-personal violence, marital dissatisfaction, and alcohol use) are known to be associated with increased engagement in adolescent risky behavior. The current study used a multi-method approach to examine children's emotional competence (i.e., awareness, regulation, comfort with expression, and remediation) as a mediator of relations between family stressors and risky behavior. Children and their parents participated in a longitudinal study with three assessments (pre-school, middle childhood, and adolescence). Measures included questionnaires and participation in a semi-structured interview about emotions.; Results suggested that family stressors exerted a negative effect on several areas of children's emotional competence. Exposure to stressors in early childhood predicted problems with emotional competence in middle childhood, and cross-sectional relations were found during adolescence. Deficits in children's emotional competence during middle childhood and adolescence were in turn associated with increased adolescent risky behavior including: higher levels of substance use and sexual activity, and greater externalizing and internalizing problems. Mother depression emerged as a consistent predictor of adolescent risky behavior through children's emotion regulation abilities. Preliminary support was additionally found for parental warmth to serve as a protective factor from the negative effects of family stressors, and associations with deviant peers to function as an additional risk factor for engaging in risky behavior during adolescence. Findings suggest that children's emotional competence may serve as a useful point of intervention to decrease risky behavior in adolescence by providing children with the additional skills needed to buffer them from the stresses of living in a stressful home environment.