Like mother, like child? Examining the direct and indirect associations of family functioning and materialism with child psychopathology using mother-child dyads

Overwhelming evidence shows that poor family functioning is positively associated with adolescent psychopathology, but the psychological mechanism between the two has not been thoroughly explicated. Additionally, the reciprocal interdependence between family members regarding this association has been largely ignored in the literature. The present study filled those prominent gaps by evaluating a conceptually important but empirically less studied factor—materialism—in this association using the actor-partner interdependence framework. A convenience sample of 1330 mother-child dyads (pairs) with 14- to 17-year-old adolescents participated in this study, and the actor-partner interdependence model was employed to analyze this dyadic data. The analyses revealed that mother’s materialism was affected by the significant actor and partner effects of both mother’s and child’s family functioning. Importantly, mother’s materialism significantly mediated the negative association between mother’s and child’s family functioning and child’s internalizing and externalizing difficulties. In aggregate, the present findings indicate that mother’s materialism stands at a crossroads linking poor family functioning and adolescent psychopathology, and therapists or practitioners working with mothers’ materialism could break this vicious linkage.