The preteens reported “telling all” most often for the “at a friend's house with no adult around” scenario. It was for this same scenario that children were least likely to be secretive or to lie.
In contrast, adolescents were least likely to “tell all” and most likely to try to keep it a secret or lie after watching or listening to a forbidden TV show or music, Dr. Laird said, adding that secrecy was highest for personal issues, such as dating.
“These data also suggest that adolescents may be using strategic disclosure to expand their autonomy over issues in the personal domain,” he said.
Dr. Laird also found that “telling all” was associated with fewer behavior problems; “telling if asked” was associated with less delinquent behavior and rule breaking but not with less depressed mood; and selective disclosure, keeping secrets, and lying were linked to more internalizing and externalizing problems.
Together, the pattern suggests that children are most honest and forthcoming for the scenario involving unsupervised time at a friend's house.
“Part of their motivation is to hide things they don't want their parents to know about, while another part of their motivation is to carve out things they don't think their parents should know about,” according to Dr. Laird.
Clinicians should be aware of these motivations so they can help families sort them out and reduce conflict without prompting undue interrogations by parents.
“There's a lot of evidence showing that if parents have to ask their children what they're up to, it's already a bad situation, and for the clinician to urge parents to ask a whole lot of questions endangers an already shaky relationship,” he said.
As in the Dutch study, youngsters were more likely to disclose information to parents with whom they had good relationships.
Predictably, delinquent behavior was lowest when children revealed more, and the frequency with which kids tell about their misbehavior is more strongly linked to delinquent behavior when family conflict is high, Dr. Laird noted.
“This pattern is consistent with our hypothesis that strategic disclosure is less problematic, and may be a sign of autonomy, when the parent-child relationship quality is high,” he said.
Depressed mood was less prevalent among children who reported hiding very little, especially when conflict was low. Among those who hid more information, however, those with the least conflict reported the most depressed mood.
“Our results replicate prior work showing that hiding is linked with more behavior problems and telling with fewer behavior problems,” Dr. Laird said.
“Although we looked at a more limited age group, our findings are similar to the Dutch findings by Dr. Keijsers and colleagues, whose age-related results make a lot of sense,” he said, adding that keeping an occasional secret is not harmful.
“With my 11- and 12-year-olds, it's hard to imagine that keeping secrets in any situation is good, but by the time a person is 17 or 18, there are things in your life that your parents don't need to know about,” Dr. Laird said.
A third approach to investigating adolescents' management of information was taken by researchers at the University of Rochester (N.Y.), who used Web-based daily diary methods to examine daily variations in secrecy and disclosure with mothers.
In this study, participants were poor 9th and 10th graders recruited from an urban high school. The sample had a mean age of 15 years and consisted of 108 students. Fifty of the students were boys.
Each day for 2 weeks, e-mail links were sent to the adolescents' e-mail accounts. “Most of the kids had access to the Internet, and if they didn't have an e-mail account, we gave them a 14-day account on Gmail,” said lead author Judi Smetana, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry. Those with no Internet access at home completed surveys at school.
The teens, most of whom lived chaotic, mobile lives, were rated on “how much they concealed or kept secret from mother,” and on “how much they told or disclosed today without mother asking,” as well as on measures of relationship quality and time spent that day with their mothers.
Also in the mix were bad behavior items relating to risky or unsafe behavior, activities that parents might not approve of, issues relating to school, and personal thoughts and actions.
As in Dr. Laird's study, the teens were more secretive about personal matters than they were about risky or bad behavior, which Dr. Smetana found surprising. Overall, levels of secrecy and disclosure, reported on a daily basis, were low and uncorrelated.