Adolescent Boys’ Trust in Their Mothers and The Order in The Structure of Its Predictors

Introduction. The scientific-psychological validity of the a priori attitude of practicing psychologists and parents, which states that adolescents’ trusting attitude toward parents exists only in the form of an opposition of trust or mistrust, was tested when addressing the problem of adolescent mistrust. The implementation of the validation is based on the previously developed model for studying ambivalent trust.

Objective. To examine the features of categorized trust/mother distrust relationships in 15-year-old adolescent males and the role of order in the structure of predictors of maternal trust in these relationships.

Materials and Methods. The following methods were applied in the study: content analysis based on expert evaluations; subjective scaling according to the given parameters; statistical technology of construct development; classification of trust/distrust ratio; approximation by hyperbolic rank parametric distribution; nonparametric statistics.

Results. The study sample consisted of adolescent boys 15 years old (n = 177) of municipal educational institution the highshcool of Rostov-on-Don. As a result of the study, the data demonstrating “absolute trust” and “absolute distrust” were obtained only in 19 % of subjects, the rest have different variants of ambivalent trust (p ≤ 0.01). Significant predictors of trust to mother in adolescent boys of 15 years old are “me-trust”, honesty, reliability, fairness, commitment to fulfill promises, non-evaluative attitude. The average values of β coefficient are higher in the “positive” variant of ambivalent trust, when adolescent boys of 15 years old have both trust and distrust in their mothers, with the former prevailing.

Discussion. It has been established that the conviction of practicing psychologists and parents that adolescents’ trusting attitude to their mothers exists only in the form of the opposition of trust and distrust is not quite correct and can lead to serious negative consequences in solving the problem of maternal distrust. The peculiarities of the classified correlations of trust/distrust in mothers and the orderliness of the structure of predictors of trust in mothers allow us to consider that the observed behavioral patterns of “trust” in mothers may not reflect its truthfulness, but act as a “means” of solving their conscious and unconscious tasks through the mechanism of protection from inadequate, from the point of view of the adolescent, attempts of the mother to penetrate into his inner world, or as a desire to escape from their own responsibility through trust.

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