10 Chapter 1 Parental caregiving is one of the most fascinating and best-preserved behaviors throughout evolution of mammalian species, humans included. It facilitates parents to perceive and appropriately respond to physiological and emotional cues from their offspring, signaling hunger, pain, or distress, therewith serving as an innate parental protection system (De Waal, 2008). As previously phrased by Barrett and Fleming (2011), parental caregiving can be described as a beautiful dance between a parent and child during which a parent learns to be adaptive and sensitive to the needs of their offspring. Concurrently, parents need to guide the quality and nature of this care to ensure normal growth and development of their offspring. Although this can be a challenge throughout all stages of development, adolescence is thought to be a specifically challenging period for parent-child dyads. This is due to the tremendous social, emotional, behavioral, and environmental changes adolescents encounter, which demands a different parental skillset compared to childhood. Parents need to adapt to these changes and need to find a new balance between being sensitive and responsive to the changing needs and emotional states of their adolescent child, while also giving appropriate guidance, and support their child’s ability to make autonomous decisions (Kobak et al., 2017). When all goes well, this will lead to a strong socio-emotional connection between a parent and child and a securely attached relationship, which fosters healthy socio-emotional development in the transition from childhood to adulthood (George & Solomon, 1999). However, flourishing in this task turns out to be a bigger challenge for some parent-child dyads than for others and several inter-individual factors are thought to affect this parent-child dance, demanding for an adjustment of the “dance steps” or the “rhythm”. During adolescence, parent-child dyads find themselves in a complex emotional landscape and, although not in every family, increases in the frequency and intensity of conflicts are more likely in this period than in others (Arnett, 1999; de Gelder et al., 2011; Restifo & Bögels, 2009; Shanahan et al., 2007). A factor likely contributing to these changes in family dynamics is the enhanced sensitivity to social evaluation in adolescents (Somerville, 2013), which gives rise to higher levels of affect lability and irritability (Steinberg & Silk, 2002). In addition, adolescents become more autonomous in this period and the relationship with their parents starts to take on a new, more egalitarian, form (Crone & Dahl, 2012). Altogether, the parent-adolescent relationship is put under pressure during this developmental period and parents and adolescents need to find a new balance in connecting with each other on a social and emotional level. This is important as, despite adolescents starting to spend more time with peers, they still perceive their parents as their most important advisors. This is in line with the fact that parental support remains a strong predictor of adolescents’ wellbeing and mental health (Baumrind, 1991; Yap et al., 2014), showing the ongoing importance of a strong parent-child bond during adolescence. Feeling connected with others on a socio-emotional level can be defined as a deep bond that is formed between people, which made them feel loved, cared for, and valued by the other
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