Conceptions of Parental Authority in Divorced and Married Mothers and Their Adolescents

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Abstract
Conceptions of parental authority were assessed in 28 divorced, unremarried mothers and 66 married mothers and their 6th-11th graders. Participants were presented with 15 items pertaining to family transgressions, 4 moral, 4 conventional, 3 personal, and 4 multifaceted (containing conventional and personal components). For each act, participants judged the legitimacy of parental jurisdiction, justified its wrongness or permissibility, and assessed its contingency on parental authority. As expected, regardless of family structure, mothers and adolescents treated both moral and conventional issues as being more legitimately subject to parental jurisdiction than multifaceted and personal issues. However, married mothers of boys and divorced mothers of girls treated all rules as being more legitimately subject to parental jurisdiction than did divorced mothers of boys. Correspondingly, married families of mid-adolescent girls and divorced families of mid-adolescent boys treated personal and multifaceted items as under personal jurisdiction more than did married families with younger girls and divorced families with mid-adolescent girls, respectively. Adolescents' personal reasoning and sorting of items as issues of personal jurisdiction increased with age and conventional reasoning about the multifaceted items decreased with age in married families but not in divorced families. Findings are discussed in terms of the effects of divorce on adolescent-parent relationships and the development of autonomy in adolescence.