It isn't just Mom: Gendered provision of family and home responsibilities among emerging adults during COVID-19.

Media and research reports have highlighted the disproportionate burden of home and family responsibilities shouldered by women and mothers due to COVID-19-related school/childcare shutdowns. This cross-sectional study extends this line of inquiry to emerging adults. Our study of 329 diverse emerging adults suggests that young women took on more home/family responsibilities than young men amidst the pandemic, and that these duties were associated with symptoms of depression. However, results also indicate that emerging adults who reported greater home/family responsibilities amidst the pandemic also experienced more quality family time, suggesting that pandemic-related challenges may have also been accompanied by opportunities for family connection. Contrary to previous research that has shown home/family responsibilities to be concentrated by SES and race/ethnicity, we found that participants uniformly endorsed COVID-19-related impacts on home/family responsibilities across these demographic distinctions. This could reflect the ubiquity of COVID-19's impact; across race/ethnicity and class-but differentially by gender-young adults faced significant challenges in taking on new home/family roles.

Parent strategies to help emerging adults manage stress are associated with their mental health: A dyadic coping perspective.

Emerging adults (EAs) are at high risk for mental health challenges and frequently reach out to their parents for support. Yet little is known about how parents help emerging adults manage and cope with daily stressors and which strategies help and which hinder EA mental health. In this cross-sectional pilot study of students at a 2- and 4-year college (ages 18-25, N = 680, mean age = 19.0), we extend models of dyadic coping from intimate relationships to the parent-emerging adult relationship and test whether six specific parent strategies to help emerging adults manage stress are associated with EA mental health. Emerging adults with parents who provided problem and emotion-focused supportive dyadic coping, delegated dyadic coping, and common/joint dyadic coping reported fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as higher levels of psychological well-being. In contrast, college-attending emerging adults who reported higher levels of parent-provided negative dyadic coping reported higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and lower psychological well-being. Parent-emerging adult dyadic coping is a fruitful area for future research and intervention development.

Digital location tracking in the parent/caregiver-college student dyad.

INTRODUCTION: As college students navigate new developmental milestones, many families rely on digital technology to stay connected and aid in the transition to adulthood. Digital location tracking apps allow for parental monitoring in new ways that may have implications for youth development. Although recent research has begun to examine prevalence and motivations for digital location tracking in adolescence, we know little about how and why families continue to track into the transition to college, and how this may relate to perceptions of helicopter and autonomy supportive parenting. METHODS: In a cross-sectional study of 706 community college and 4-year university students in the Southeastern United States, we describe prevalence and sociodemographic differences in parent/caregiver digital location tracking of their college student children, and how this may be associated with perceptions of helicopter parenting and parent/caregiver autonomy support. RESULTS: Findings suggest that digital location tracking is a fairly common practice among college students, with nearly half of the sample endorsing currently or previously being digitally location tracked by their parent/caregiver. Younger, White, and higher socioeconomic status students were more likely to be tracked. Those students who were currently being digitally location tracked tended to perceive their primary parent/caregiver as engaging in more helicopter parenting and as less supportive of their autonomy. CONCLUSIONS: This brief report provides preliminary insight into parent/caregiver digital location tracking of their college student children. It is our hope that future research will further examine how digital location tracking may be helping or hindering attainment of developmental milestones in the digital age.

Dyadic parent-college student digital interaction styles.

Parents and their emerging adult children are highly connected via mobile phones in the digital age. This digital connection has potential implications for the development of autonomy and sustained parent-child relatedness across the course of emerging adulthood. The present study uses the qualitatively coded content of nearly 30,000 U.S. parent-college student text messages, exchanged by 238 college students and their mothers and fathers over the course of 2 weeks, to identify distinct dyadic parent-emerging adult digital interaction styles across dimensions of responsiveness and monitoring. Results reveal that digital interaction styles are largely consistent across age, gender, and parent education as well as reflective (i.e., texting patterns of parents and emerging adults mirror one another), with little evidence of overparenting profiles. Results also show that those college students who are reciprocally disengaged in text messaging with their parents perceive their parents as less digitally supportive. However, no styles were associated with perceived parental pressure to digitally engage. Findings suggest that the mobile phone is likely a valuable tool to maintain connection with few risks for undermining the privacy and autonomy of emerging adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emerging adults' digital technology engagement and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Within the past decade, parents, scientists, and policy makers have sought to understand how digital technology engagement may exacerbate or ameliorate young people's mental health symptoms, a concern that has intensified amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has been far from conclusive, and a lack of research consensus may stem in part from widely varying measurement strategies (including subjective and objective measurement) around digital technology engagement. In a cross-sectional study of 323 university students, the present study seeks to understand the ways in which youth engagement with digital technology - across subjective and objective measurements, weekday and weekend distinctions, and social and non-social uses - is associated with mental health (as measured by depression, loneliness, and multidimensional mood and anxiety). The present study also tested a differential susceptibility hypothesis to examine whether COVID-19 related social isolation might exacerbate the potential harms or helps of digital technology engagement. Results yielded few observed associations between digital technology engagement and mental health, with little evidence of detrimental effects of observed or perceived time spent on digital technology. Rather, those significant findings which did emerge underscore potential protections conferred by social connections with friends (both online and offline), and that the loneliest students may be the most likely to be reaching out for these types of connections. It is important that the field move beyond crude (largely self-reported) measures of screen time to instead understand how and to what effect youth are using digital technologies, especially during the social corridor of emerging adulthood.

Shift and Persist in Mexican American Youth: A Longitudinal Test of Depressive Symptoms.

This paper tested whether shift-&-persist coping, or coping involving the combination of cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and optimism (Chen & Miller, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012, 7, 135), attenuates the risks presented by economic hardship and ethnic discrimination for change in depressive symptoms from 9th to 12th grade, in a sample of 674 Mexican American youth (Mage W1 = 10.86; 50% female; 72% US born) and whether this effect depends on ethnic pride. Structural equation modeling indicated that, when accounting for economic hardship, shift-&-persist was associated with fewer concurrent depression symptoms. Youth with lower ethnic pride who endorsed high levels of shift-&-persist were protected against the negative impacts of peer ethnic discrimination on depressive symptoms. Future research on ethnic discrimination should examine patterns of coping and identity that can mitigate risk.

Associations Between Adolescents' Daily Digital Technology Use and Sleep.

PURPOSE: Although studies have found associations between greater digital technology use and poorer sleep health among adolescents, these studies typically rely on self-reported sleep and cross-sectional designs. This study applied an ecological momentary assessment design to examine how adolescents' daily digital technology use relates to self-reported sleep and wearable-recorded sleep duration. METHODS: A socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 388 adolescents completed daily surveys of their digital technology use (i.e., messages sent, time for academics, time for leisure) and sleep for 2 weeks. Sleep duration was recorded through wearable devices among a subsample of 254 adolescents for an average of 3.4 days. RESULTS: Adolescents who reported spending more time using digital technology for nonacademic purposes than their peers reported both shorter self-reported sleep duration and later bedtime (between-person associations). Adolescents who sent more messages than their peers also had shorter sleep duration as recorded by wearable devices. In contrast, few associations were observed when comparisons were made within-individuals with adolescents used as their own controls. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with prior research, adolescents who reported greater nonacademic daily digital technology use relative to their peers exhibited worse sleep outcomes as measured via self-reports and wearable devices. However, associations with sleep outcomes were weak and inconsistent when adolescents were used as their own controls. Future research should continue to explore between- and within-person associations between digital technology use and sleep to understand potential key differences.

Victimized in many ways: Online and offline bullying/harassment and perceived racial discrimination in diverse racial-ethnic minority adolescents.

Objectives: Racial-ethnic minority youth face multiple types of victimization associated with negative developmental outcomes. The present study examined the interplay of youth experiences of online and offline bullying/harassment and racial-ethnic discrimination across three waves. Methods: Racial-ethnic minority adolescents aged 10-19 (N = 735) at Midwest schools were surveyed yearly on Internet usage and experiences, mental well-being, and related risk and protective factors. We analyzed offline and online bullying/harassment, offline and online racial-ethnic discrimination, and time online in an autoregressive cross-lagged panel model. Results: Youth who reported more of one type of victimization also reported more of other victimization types and more time online concurrently. Our results show some (but not consistent) influences over time. Youth who experienced more offline bullying/harassment at wave 1 were more likely to report more wave 2 victimization in another context (online bullying/harassment) and in other content (offline racial-ethnic discrimination), although these associations did not appear in the second wave. Youth who reported more online bullying/harassment at wave 2 also experienced increased risk for offline bullying/harassment at wave 3. Youth who reported more time online were not more likely to experience later victimization, though youth who experienced more wave 1 offline bullying/harassment were more likely to report more next-wave time online. Conclusions: Racial-ethnic minority youth simultaneously and persistently face multiple types of victimization. Offline bullying/harassment interventions may have the added benefit of reducing other forms of victimization down the road, while reducing time online alone is unlikely to protect youth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Does Adolescent Digital Technology Use Detract from the Parent-Adolescent Relationship?

A population-representative sample of young adolescents (N = 2,104, mean age 12.4) reported on digital technology use and relationships in 2015. A subsample (N = 388) completed a 14-day ecological momentary assessment in 2016-2017 via mobile phone. Across the 2,104 adolescents, those who reported more social networking site engagement were more likely to live in families characterized by more family chaos and to report that their online experiences resulted in problems with their parents. However, when the subsample of adolescents was followed daily, there was little consistent evidence that adolescents' quantity of daily digital technology use detracted from the amount of time they spend interacting with close others (including parents) nor that adolescent daily technology use was associated with more negative or less positive parent-adolescent interactions.

Daily Parent-Adolescent Digital Exchanges.

The present study tracked adolescents via mobile phones to describe how parents and their adolescent children are using digital technologies in daily life (i.e. facilitating warmth and behavioral control), and whether these uses are associated with the quality of offline parent-adolescent interactions and with adolescents' mental health. A sample of young adolescents (N = 388; mean age 13.37) completed a 14-day ecological momentary assessment in 2016- 2017, reporting on their daily digital contact and offline interactions with their parents and their mental health. Adolescents reported using texting and calling to communicate somewhat infrequently with their parents (i.e., on 29% of days), but days with more digital contacts (for both warmth and behavioral control) were also more likely to be characterized by more positive offline interactions with parents. Furthermore, adolescents struggling with mental health symptoms across the study period reported using texts/calls more frequently to seek out parent support, and parents were more likely to do text/call "check ins" on young people who were experiencing more behavioral problems. Results highlight the potential for digital communication devices to be used as tools in fostering parent-adolescent connection, support provision, and behavioral control in the digital era.

Text message content as a window into college student drinking: Development and initial validation of a dictionary of "alcohol talk".

The ubiquity of digital communication within the high-risk drinking environment of college students raises exciting new directions for prevention research. However, we are lacking relevant constructs and tools to analyze digital platforms that serve to facilitate, discuss, and rehash alcohol use. In the current study, we introduce the construct of alcohol-talk (or the extent to which college students use alcohol-related words in text messaging exchanges) as well as introduce and validate a novel tool for measuring this construct. We describe a closed-vocabulary, dictionary-based method for assessing alcohol-talk. Analyses of 569,172 text messages from 267 college students indicate that this method produces a reliable and valid measure that correlates as expected with self-reported alcohol and related risk constructs. We discuss the potential utility of this method for prevention studies.

Digital Parenting of Emerging Adults in the 21st Century.

In emerging adulthood, when many young people are away from their families for the first time, mobile phones become an important conduit for maintaining relationships with parents. Yet, objective assessment of the content and frequency of text messaging between emerging adults and their parents is lacking in much of the research to date. We collected two weeks of text messages exchanged between U.S. college students (N = 238) and their parents, which yielded nearly 30,000 parent-emerging adult text messages. We coded these text message exchanges for traditional features of parent-emerging adult communication indexing positive connection, monitoring and disclosures. Emerging adults texted more with mothers than with fathers and many messages constitute parental check-ins and emerging adult sharing regarding youth behavior and well-being. Findings highlight that both the frequency and content of parent-emerging adult text messages can be linked with positive (perceived text message support) and negative (perceived digital pressure) aspects of the parent-emerging adult relationship. The content of parent-emerging adult text messages offers a valuable, objective window into the nature of the parent-emerging adult relationships in the digital age of the 21st century.

Adolescent development and growing divides in the digital age
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Adolescents are constantly connected to their devices, and concerns have been raised that this connectivity is damaging their development more generally, and their mental health in particular. Recent narrative reviews and meta-analyses do not support a strong linkage between the quantity of adolescents' digital technology engagement and mental health problems. Instead, it appears that offline vulnerabilities tend to mirror and shape online risks in ways that may further amplify mental health inequalities among youth. New approaches for supporting youth mental health, especially for vulnerable youth and those typically excluded from traditional services, are now both possible and required.
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Los adolescentes están constantemente conectados a sus dispositivos, y se ha planteado la preocupación de que esta conectividad puede dañar su desarrollo en general, y su salud mental en particular. Las revisiones narrativas y los metanálisis recientes no establecen una relación estrecha entre el grado de participación de los adolescentes en la tecnología digital y los problemas de salud mental. En cambio, parece que las vulnerabilidades cuando no están conectados tienden a reflejar y dar forma a los riesgos cuando están en línea, de manera que se pueden amplificar aún más las desigualdades de salud mental entre los jóvenes. Actualmente es possible y necesario desarrollar nuevos enfoques para apoyar la salud mental de los jóvenes, especialmente de los más vulnerables y de aquéllos que típicamente son excluidos de los servicios tradicionales.

Le comportement des adolescents constamment connectés à leurs téléphones suscite des inquiétudes quant aux conséquences de cette connectivité sur leur développement en général et leur santé mentale en particulier. Les récentes revues de la littérature et méta-analyses n'établissent pas de lien étroit entre l'importance de l'implication des adolescents dans les technologies numériques et les problèmes de santé mentale. Il semble au contraire que les vulnérabilités hors connexion reflètent et modèlent les risques en ligne, majorant encore les inégalités de santé mentale chez les jeunes. Il est désormais possible et nécessaire d'inventer de nouvelles façons d'aider la santé mentale des jeunes, en particulier celle des plus vulnérables et de ceux qui n'ont généralement plus accès aux réseaux de soutien habituels.

Young Adolescents' Digital Technology Use, Perceived Impairments, and Well-Being in a Representative Sample.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the cross-sectional associations between young adolescents' access, use, and perceived impairments related to digital technologies and their academic, psychological, and physical well-being. STUDY DESIGN: There were 2104 adolescents (ages 10-15 years), representative of the North Carolina Public School population, who completed questionnaires in 2015. Administrative educational records were linked with parental consent. RESULTS: Nearly all young adolescents (95%) had Internet access, 67% owned a mobile phone, and 68% had a social media account. Mobile phone ownership was not associated with any indicators of well-being (math and reading test scores, school belonging, psychological distress, conduct problems, or physical health) after controlling for demographic factors. Having a social media account and frequency of social media use were only robustly associated with conduct problems (explaining ∼3% of the variation in conduct problems). Despite the lack of strong associations, 91% of adolescents reported at least 1 perceived technology-related impairment and 29% of adolescents reported online-to-offline spillover of negative experiences. Economically disadvantaged adolescents reported similar access, but greater online-to-offline spillover and stronger associations between social media account ownership and poor psychological well-being compared with their more affluent peers. CONCLUSIONS: At the population level, there was little evidence that digital technology access and use is negatively associated with young adolescents' well-being. Youth from economically disadvantaged families were equally likely to have access to digital technologies, but were more likely than their more affluent peers to report negative online experiences. Closing the digital divide requires prioritizing equity in experiences and opportunities, as well as in access.

Annual Research Review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age: facts, fears, and future directions.

Adolescents are spending an increasing amount of their time online and connected to each other via digital technologies. Mobile device ownership and social media usage have reached unprecedented levels, and concerns have been raised that this constant connectivity is harming adolescents' mental health. This review synthesized data from three sources: (a) narrative reviews and meta-analyses conducted between 2014 and 2019, (b) large-scale preregistered cohort studies and (c) intensive longitudinal and ecological momentary assessment studies, to summarize what is known about linkages between digital technology usage and adolescent mental health, with a specific focus on depression and anxiety. The review highlights that most research to date has been correlational, focused on adults versus adolescents, and has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations. The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents' well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance. Implications for improving future research and for supporting adolescents' mental health in the digital age are discussed.

Coping and Culture: The Protective Effects of Shift-&-Persist and Ethnic-Racial Identity on Depressive Symptoms in Latinx Youth.

Shift-&-persist is a coping strategy that has been shown to lead to positive health outcomes in low-SES youth but has not yet been examined with respect to psychological health. This study tests whether the shift-&-persist coping strategy works in tandem with ethnic-racial identity to protect against depressive symptoms in the face of two uncontrollable stressors: economic hardship and peer discrimination. In a sample of 175 Latinx youth (51.4% female; Mage = 12.9), shift-&-persist buffered the positive relation between economic hardship and depressive symptoms. In terms of peer discrimination, among youth who reported little use of shift and persist, discrimination was related to higher depressive symptoms, whereas youth who reported higher amounts of shift and persist (at and above the mean) were protected and did not evidence this association. However, among youth with high ethnic-racial identity, shift-&-persist failed to protect against the deleterious association between peer discrimination and depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that shift-&-persist is protective for Latinx youth, although the context in which it is protective changes based on the racialized/non-racialized nature of the stressor.

Young Adolescents' Digital Technology Use and Mental Health Symptoms: Little Evidence of Longitudinal or Daily Linkages.

This study examines whether adolescents' digital technology use is associated with mental health symptoms (N=388) during early to mid-adolescence. Adolescents completed an initial Time 1 (T1) assessment in 2015, followed by a 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via mobile phone in 2016-2017 which yielded 13,017 total observations over 5270 study days. Adolescents' T1 technology use did not predict later mental health symptoms. Adolescents' reported mental health was also not worse on days when they reported spending more versus less time on technology. Little was found to support daily quadratic associations (whereby adolescent mental health was worse on days with little or excessive use). Adolescents at higher risk for mental health problems also exhibited no signs of increased risk for mental health problems on higher technology use days. Findings from this EMA study do not support the narrative that young adolescents' digital technology usage is associated with elevated mental health symptoms.

Synthesizing a Special Issue on Parenting Adolescents in an Increasingly Diverse World.

Our goal is to identify integrative themes in this special issue on "Parenting Adolescents in an Increasingly Diverse World". Specifically, we identify themes that may generalize largely from studies of marginalized families to guide American families more broadly as youth navigate an increasingly diverse world. We describe three broad diversity socialization goals that may foster greater intercultural maturity in youth. These include helping youth find their place and value in a multicultural world, increase the value that they place on others and decrease their fears of difference, and prepare to respond to biased or perceived rejection. And we offer five directions for future research to help build a path forward in this important area of study.

Text Messaging and Social Network Site Use to Facilitate Alcohol Involvement: A Comparison of U.S. and Korean College Students.

Alcohol-related content on public social networking sites (SNS) has been linked to collegiate alcohol use, but we know little about whether and how private forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC), like text messaging, are related to collegiate drinking, nor how alcohol-related CMC content and drinking are associated in non-Western cultures. We examined the ways in which private text messaging and SNS are used to facilitate alcohol involvement among U.S. (n = 575) and Korean (n = 462) college students (total N = 1037), two technologically wired cultures with prevalent collegiate alcohol misuse. Results show that college students prefer private text messaging over SNS to find parties and facilitate alcohol involvement, and this preference tends to be stronger in Korea than the United States. Private text messaging is more consistently and strongly associated with alcohol use frequency and heavy episodic drinking than SNS posts in both countries, with particularly robust associations between private text messaging and drinking in the United States. Findings underscore the role of CMCs in facilitating alcohol involvement and highlight the potential for analysis of private message content to further understand computer-mediated social processes in college student drinking.

Effect of Middle School Interventions on Alcohol Misuse and Abuse in Mexican American High School Adolescents: Five-Year Follow-up of a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Substance abuse preventive interventions frequently target middle school students and demonstrate efficacy to prevent early onset and use of alcohol and illicit drugs. However, evidence of sustained results to prevent later patterns of alcohol misuse and more serious alcohol abuse disorders has been lacking, particularly for US Latino populations. Objective: To test whether a universal middle school prevention program can reduce the frequency of alcohol misuse and rates of alcohol use disorder 5 years after implementation with a Mexican American sample. Design, Setting, and Participants: A previous randomized clinical trial was conducted with 516 Mexican American 7th graders and at least 1 parent who identified as having Mexican origin. Three annual cohorts of families were recruited from rosters of 4 middle schools and randomized to the 9-session Bridges/Puentes family-focused group intervention or a workshop control condition. Recruitment, screening, pretest, and randomization occurred in the same academic year for each cohort: 2003-2004, 2004-2005, and 2005-2006. Data acquisition for the follow-up assessments of late-adolescent alcohol misuse and abuse, which were not included in the initial randomized clinical trial, was conducted from September 2009 to September 2014; analysis was conducted between August 2016 and July 2017. In this assessment, 420 children (81.4%) of the sample were included, when the majority were in their final year of high school. Interventions: The 9-session Bridges/Puentes intervention integrated youth, parent, and family intervention sessions that were delivered in the spring semester at each school, with separate groups for English-dominant vs Spanish-dominant families. The control workshop was offered during the same semester at each school, also in English and Spanish. Main Outcomes and Measures: Primary outcomes were diagnostic assessment of lifetime alcohol use disorder in the 12th grade, 5 years after the intervention, based on the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children and past-year frequency of alcohol use, binge drinking, and drunkenness based on the 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Results: Of the 420 participants, 215 (51.2%) were girls (mean [SD] age, 17.9 [0.62] years). The intervention reduced the likelihood of having an alcohol use disorder (ß = -.93; SE, 0.47; P = .047; odds ratio, 0.39). Intervention associations with past-year alcohol use frequency, binge drinking, and drunkenness were moderated by baseline substance use. The intervention reduced the frequency of alcohol use (ß = -.51; SE, 0.24; P = .04; Cohen d = 0.43) and drunkenness (ß = -.51; SE, 0.26; P = .049; Cohen d = 0.41) among youth who reported any previous substance use at baseline (T1 initiators) but not among those who had not initiated any substance use (T1 abstainers) at baseline. For past-year binge drinking, the intervention finding did not reach statistical significance among T1 initiators (ß = -.40; SE, 0.23; P = .09) or T1 abstainers (ß = .23; SE, 0.14; P = .11). Conclusions and Relevance: Study results support an association between a universal middle school intervention and alcohol misuse and alcohol use disorders among Mexican American high school students and implementation of universal middle school interventions to reach Latino communities.