Perception about adult caregiving among Chilean adolescents.

Background: Chronic stress has short and long-term consequences during child and adolescent development if the stress is not mediated by adult care-giving.

Aim: To assess the perceptions of parental responsiveness, demand, and monitoring among seventh grade students.

Material and methods: We applied the Brief Parental Scale (developed and validated locally) asking 12 items about three dimensions, namely responsiveness, demand, and monitoring to 524 seventh grade students aged 12 years, 48% females, from eight public and private schools at Santiago.

Results: The overall response rate was 85%. While the scores were higher for mothers, a significantly constant gradient for the same dimensions (demand > responsiveness > monitoring) was verified for both parents.

Conclusions: The main hypothesis emerged from our study is that adolescents seem to perceive a discrepancy in terms of a relatively high demand and lower monitoring from parents/guardians towards them. The differences between fathers and mothers in adolescent care and the different perceptions by gender of adolescents about parental caregiving, require a further analysis.