Parent–adolescent communication and Chinese adolescents’ self-esteem: A cross-lagged model

We investigated the reciprocal relationship between parent–adolescent communication and adolescents’ self-esteem with a sample of 296 Chinese junior middle school students over a course of approximately 3 months, using an autoregressive cross-lagged model. The results showed that both parent–adolescent communication and adolescent self-esteem had invariant autoregressive effects over the 3 months. In addition, parent–adolescent communication had a significant cross-lagged effect on adolescent self-esteem and vice versa, indicating reciprocal effects between parent–adolescent communication and adolescent self-esteem over time. Our findings suggest that multilevel intervention incorporating individual counseling and family intervention is more effective in improving parent–adolescent communication and adolescent self-esteem than either individual counseling or family intervention alone.