How Can Clinicians Improve Parental Monitoring of Adolescents? A Content Review of Manualized Interventions.

Parental monitoring of teens' activities is a well-established protective factor targeted in many interventions to reduce problem behavior. However, no paper has compiled the extant recommendations on how clinicians should seek to improve parental monitoring-what psychoeducation to give parents, what behaviors to request of parents, and how to support parents in changing monitoring behaviors. Drawing from the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology's (SCCAP) lists of empirically supported treatments for adolescent problem behaviors, we reviewed the contents of 16 manualized interventions and extracted every mention of parental monitoring, then synthesized and organized the content. Our review yielded 23 recommendations for parents and 16 recommendations for clinicians, which we offer as a preliminary list of evidence-based recommendations on how to improve parental monitoring. Most of the 16 reviewed manuals contained a fraction of the total recommendations (mean = 8.1 out of 39) and only a few included concrete, detailed, in-depth instructions about how to monitor or implement changes in monitoring. Thus, it may be possible to improve the efficacy of existing manualized interventions by borrowing monitoring content and strategies from other manuals. Finally, we identified four major gaps in our existing recommendations that should be addressed in future empirical research. The reviewed manuals offered little advice about (1) how to prioritize among many monitoring recommendations, (2) when (if ever) to decrease monitoring, (3) how to minimize the chances of adverse teen reactions to monitoring, and (4) how to monitor teens using technology (e.g., digital location tracking, social media).