Objective: Good parent-child communication is associated with adolescent well-being. The aim of the present study was to report time trends in parent-adolescent communication in biological and stepfamilies in the Czech Republic between 2002 and 2014 and to assess gender and age differences.
Methods: The research sample consisted of 16,160 adolescents aged 11, 13, and 15 years (48.1% of boys) who participated in the 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 surveys within the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study in the Czech Republic. The trends in family communication were evaluated using logistic regression.
Results: Compared with 2002, a significant increase in the ease of communication with biological parents was observed in 2014. On the other hand, the adolescents' perception of communication with stepparents did not change in this period. Compared with the girls, a higher rate of boys reported communication with their father or stepfather as being easy throughout the study period. The ease of talking to biological parents decreased with age.
Conclusion: The growing positive trend demonstrated an improvement in communication in intact families at the beginning of the 21st century, while communication with stepparents remained unchanged from 2002 to 2014. The increase in rates of ease of communication with biological fathers was reported by both genders. However, the ease of talking to biological mothers grew mainly among boys.
Keywords: HBSC study; adolescents; communication; parents; stepparents; trends.
Copyright© by the National Institute of Public Health, Prague 2017