Adolescent Autonomy and Parent-Adolescent Communication: A Comparative Critical Review of English, Chinese, and Spanish Literature

Adolescent’s growing autonomy is considered one of the most important developmental tasks, which could be shaped through parent-adolescent interactions and communication. However, growing independence may mean different experiences for adolescents and their families in non-Western contexts. As the dominant adolescent development theories and research are published in English, these theories are mainly grounded in perspectives emphasizing universal needs and processes toward autonomy, self-development, and individualism originating from Western cultural context. Cultural blind spots and biases could exist in studying the experiences of adolescents growing up in Chinese and Latin American and Caribbean families. Anchoring on Bronfenbrenner’s socioecological framework, this chapter addresses two aims: (1) to describe the experiences of adolescent autonomy development and parent-adolescent communication, studied by scholars from three cultural contexts, and (2) to analyze whether these Western approaches prevail in guiding Chinese and LAC research and to discuss some of the challenging theoretical and methodological issues. This chapter conducts a multilingual critical review through a comparative approach, reviewing and analyzing studies in English, Chinese, and Spanish.