Goal‐Driven Dynamic Change in Parental Monitoring and Adolescent Information Management: A Novel Conceptual Model and Simulation

To be effective, adolescents' parents must have basic knowledge about what their children do, who they spend their time with, and what they care about. There is broad consensus that parental monitoring facilitates adolescent information sharing and that information sharing is the most important factor predicting parents' knowledge of their adolescents' lives (Liu et al. 2020). Nonetheless, under some circumstances, vicious cycles can develop in which adolescents react to parents' attempts to gain information by becoming more secretive and parents, in turn, respond to adolescents' secrecy by becoming more intrusive (Hawk et al. 2013, 2016). Despite developmentalists' fundamental interest in the study of change, most current conceptual models of monitoring are static. Specifically, theories have little to say about what would initiate change in stable family systems. This paper integrates what we have learned about parental monitoring, adolescent information sharing, and parents' knowledge in the last decades (e.g., Gingo 2024; Liu et al. 2020) with older models of parenting practice, style, and adolescents' willingness to be socialized (Cumsille et al. 2010; Darling and Steinberg 1993). It then incorporates insights from a model of monitoring borrowed from criminology (Hardie 2021a, 2022, 2024). This integrated model focuses attention on parents' goals and their ability to assess the success of their efforts as a mechanism driving change. A series of deterministic dynamic systems models illustrates predictions from this model about how parental monitoring and knowledge, adolescent information sharing, and outcomes unfold over time under different circumstances.