Anyone who has experienced a conflict with another person—family member, friend, co-worker, etc.—likely has felt some frustration that the two of them don’t see eye to eye about what happened between them, and what constitutes appropriate and acceptable behavior. This can include one person requesting a change in the other person’s behavior, the other person making a good faith effort to meet the person’s request, but the person who made the request either saying they saw no change or that the new behavior was not satisfactory.
Although conflict is not inevitable between parents and adolescents, a common frustrating challenge occurs when the two individuals perceive their own and each other’s behavior differently. For example, a parent may request that their adolescent be more helpful with chores around the house, including cleaning the adolescent’s bedroom, and after the adolescent makes some effort to comply, the parent may complain that the progress was inadequate, whereas the adolescent may argue that the parent was overlooking obvious positive actions.
In turn, the adolescent may request that the parent speak to them in a more respectful way, acknowledging positive things the adolescent does and not only focus on problems. If the parent takes the request seriously and goes out of their way to compliment the adolescent on a good grade earned in school, the adolescent may minimize the significance of the parent’s effort, complaining that the parent has little good to say about them. Researchers who study family interaction have found that such differences in parent and adolescent perceptions of each other’s behavior are quite common and distressing (e.g., Van Heel et al., 2019), resulting in Stattin et al. (2021) concluding that parents and adolescents tend to live in “different perceptual worlds.”
A variety of factors can contribute to such perceptual differences. First, although adolescents’ normal cognitive development has allowed them to take the perspective of another person, in contrast to younger children whose capacity for empathy is limited, they tend to be more present-oriented than........