Internalizing Behavior in Adolescent Girls Affects Parental Emotional Overinvolvement: A Cross-lagged Twin Study

The aim of this study was to examine the direction and the etiology of the association between different parenting styles (parental emotional overinvolvement EOI] and parental criticism) and internalizing behavior from adolescence to early adulthood. A longitudinal genetically informative cross-lagged design was applied to a population-based sample of Swedish twins contacted at age 16–17 (n = 2369) and at age 19–20 (n = 1705). Sex-limitation modelling revealed different effects for boys and girls. For girls, genetic influences on internalizing problems at age 16–17 independently explained 2.7% of the heritability in parental EOI at age 19–20. These results suggest that emotionally overinvolved and self-sacrificing parental behavior stems in part from daughters (but not sons) genetic predisposition for internalizing behavior. These findings highlight the importance of genetically influenced child-driven effects underlying the parenting-internalizing association, and clarify that the role of such effects may differ depending on sex, type of parenting and developmental period.