Associations Between Parents' Health and Social Control Behaviors and Their Adolescent's Self-Efficacy and Health Behaviors: Insights From the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating (FLASHE) survey

Background: Parents can influence their children to live healthier lifestyles by modeling healthy behaviors and/or trying to persuade their children to engage in healthier activities. Adolescents and their parents tend to have similar eating and exercise patterns, but less is known about the simultaneous influence of parent's health behavior and social control on adolescents' self-efficacy and health behaviors, including whether their effect is moderated by parenting style. Purpose: We examine the degree to which parents' social control and health behaviors are associated with their adolescent's self-efficacy and health behaviors, including whether parenting styles moderate these associations. Method: We analyzed data from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating project. Results: We found that parents' own health behaviors are positively and strongly associated with their adolescent's health behaviors across four domains: fruit/vegetable consumption, junk food consumption, physical activity, and nonacademic screen time. We found positive, moderate-to-strong associations between parents' use of social control and their adolescents' fruit/vegetable and junk food consumption, small negative associations with screen time, and no associations with physical activity. The effects of social control for junk food consumption and screen time, however, depended on parents' own behavior in those domains. Parent responsiveness moderated the relation between parents' social control and their adolescent children's self-efficacy and health behaviors. Conclusions: The health behaviors parents model and their social control efforts are associated with their adolescents' beliefs and behavior. Efforts to leverage parents as sources of influence must consider the context in which influence is enacted.