Abstract: Although adolescents spend increasing amounts of time with peers outside of the home, parents continue to play an important role in fostering healthy socioemotional development across adolescence. Links have been established between parent-child relationship quality and adjustment during adolescence. But the majority of studies on parenting asked adolescents to rate either their relationship with their mother or with their parents as a single entity. There is little information available regarding the associations of adolescent-father relationships to adolescent emotional health. Thus, research is needed to examine both adolescent-mother and adolescent-father relationships. The influence of the relationships with one parent may vary depending on the relationships with the other parent. For example, when the relationships with one parent are negative, the positive relationships with the other parent may be especially important. However, the interaction between the effects of adolescent-mother and adolescent-father relationships has not been examined in previous research. The goal of the present study is to examine the interaction between their effects on adolescents. Furthermore, adolescence is a vulnerable period for developing depression and depressive symptoms increase from early adolescence onwards. The quality of the parent-adolescent relationships is thought to be important for preventing adolescent depressive symptoms. However, the connection between parents-adolescent relationships and depression may differ among different grades, and the connection may be moderated by gender. It is thus necessary to explore the gender and grade differences in the associations between adolescent-mother or adolescent-father relationships and depression. The Chinese versions of the Revised Network of Relationships Inventory (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) by French and Children’s Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1992) were administered to 438 adolescents (246 boys and 192 girls) from grade 5, 7 and 10 to investigate the adolescents’ relationships with mothers and fathers, their effects on depression, and the moderating roles of gender and grade in the effects. The main findings were as follows: (1) Adolescents reported more maternal support than paternal support, and more conflict with mothers than with fathers. With the age increasing, both maternal and paternal support decreased, whereas conflict with either parent increased. (2) At grade 7, only parent-adolescent conflict predicted depression positively and significantly. At grade 5 and 10, perceived parental support predicted lower depression while parent-adolescent conflict predicted higher depression. At grade 5, gender moderated the relationship between either maternal support or adolescent-father conflict and depression, i.e., maternal support and adolescent-father conflict predicted depression of adolescent girls rather than boys. (3) High maternal support only moderated the association of adolescent-father conflict with depression among girls at grade 10. For those girls with low conflict with fathers, the level of maternal support was a significant predictor of depression, whereas for those with high conflict with fathers, having a supportive mother didn’t buffer the girls’ depression. The results suggested that support from parents be helpful to decrease the level of adolescents’ depression, and the conflict with parents be a risk factor, and that girls be more sensitive to interpersonal difficulties with parents, especially to the conflict with fathers.

Key words: adolescent-father relationship, adolescent-mother relationship, depression, adolescents

摘要： 以438名青少年为被试，考察青少年的亲子关系及其对抑郁的影响。结果发现：（1）青少年母亲支持高于父亲支持，母子冲突高于父子冲突，随年级升高，父母支持减少亲子冲突增多；（2）7年级仅亲子冲突显著预测抑郁，5、10年级父母支持和亲子冲突均显著预测抑郁，但5年级母亲支持和父子冲突仅预测女孩的抑郁；（3）对于10年级女孩，父女冲突较低时，母亲支持越高其抑郁越少，但父女冲突较高时，母亲支持并不能减缓其抑郁情绪。

关键词: 父子关系, 母子关系, 抑郁, 青少年