By: Grace Harris

To varying degrees, most of us know what it’s like to have a parent invade our privacy.

Whether it be Mom snooping through our phone, or Dad unscrewing the door to our bedroom, we each have to make a decision when this happens. We can either tolerate their attempts at invasion or we can defend against them.

No matter our choice, the relationship we have with our parents will be impacted by this decision. Over time, it’s easy to see how these accumulated decisions can create a healthy or unhealthy parent-child relationship. However, many people don’t understand that parent-child relationships actually have an impact on the child outside of the household environment.

Andrew Ledbetter from the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University studied the communication patterns in parent-child relationships, specifically how they affected first-year college students. Ledbetter’s research focused on four different types of parent-child relationships: combative, surrendered, guarded and trusting.

Combative relationships exist when parents frequently invade their child’s privacy and the child responds by fighting back. Children in this relationship constantly struggle to find and maintain a separate identity from their parents.

In a guarded relationship, parents are not invading the child’s privacy, yet the child has concern about the possibility of them doing so. The child’s privacy boundaries establish autonomy in this relationship but there is no active conflict since it is one-sided.

The total opposite of a guarded relationship, is a surrendered relationship. When a relationship is categorized as surrendered, the parents don’t acknowledge nor have respect for their children’s privacy and constantly invade the boundaries. The child will acknowledge these behaviors and see them as invasions, yet they avoid resisting because they deem it pointless.

The most peaceful parent-child relationship is that of a trusting relationship. Parents respect privacy boundaries and their children do not work to defend the boundaries either.

As most people would agree, it’s healthy for these four relationship-level boundary conflict patterns to change with the child’s developmental stage. A trusting or guarded relationship, for example, would be inappropriate for a toddler but desirable for a young adulthood.

While these transitions are easy for some families, others have a much harder time changing the boundaries in a relationship. Could the state of the parent-child relationship at the time the child enters their first year of college play a part in why some students excel and others face psychosocial distress?

Through a survey taken by 482 first year college students, Ledbetter analyzed how each parent-child relationship affected the students’ psychological distress at school. He asked questions on a seven-point scale to determine how participants felt on a number of topics including: family communication patterns, parental privacy invasions, children’s privacy defenses, and psychological distress. The students took this survey three different times over the course of their freshman year.

At the end of the year when the last surveys were collected, Ledbetter found that young-adults in trusting parent-child relationships exhibited the lowest levels of psychosocial distress. One participant explained that a lack of defenses and invasions probably indicates a lack of boundary turbulence “which can be embarrassing, awkward … and distressing.” Trusting relationships avoid emotions that weigh against a child’s well-being.

On the other hand, the greatest amount of distress came from children in surrendered parent-child relationships. Although this study did not measure overparenting, other research indicates that controlling parents undermine their children’s autonomy, sense of self-efficacy and ability to cope with life challenges. Not only did these children face the most distress, their distress was also enhanced over the course of the year.

Both the students and the parents in surrendered parent-child relationships are likely to be unaware of the psychological distress resulting from this unhealthy pattern. Once the parents’ invasive behaviors become a norm, there is a possibility the child won’t even see these behaviors as inappropriate, and instead resign to them.

Furthermore, the results showed that the more conversation oriented a family was, the less parental privacy invasions and children’s defenses were reported. Meaning, the more that a family communicates about various topics together, the more trust and privacy they’ll have for one another.

In addition to conversation oriented, the degree to which a family was conformity oriented, influenced the state of their relationship. Conformity orientation is the idea that children are expected to follow the beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviors of their parents. In families where conformity orientation was high, both the likelihood of invasions and defenses were greater. Ledbetter concluded that the less invasions and defenses in the relationship, resulted in less psychosocial distress the child faced.

As we grow up, we begin to value our identity outside of the family more than before. It’s not always easy talking and getting along with our parents but this isn’t to say we shouldn’t recognize how family communication patterns around privacy boundaries can impact our stress. It’s important to be mindful of the four relationship-level boundary conflict patterns and communicate with your parents when they aren’t healthy. Knowing that meaningful conversations with our parents not only positively impacts our relationship with them, but our psychological distress as well, is a good reason to keep the conversation going when you feel it’s appropriate.