[By Roni Caryn Rabin, NYT Well Blog, jul 1, 2011] Poor communication is a common complaint when it comes to parents and teenagers. What happens when you throw a cellphone into the mix?

At least 75 percent of American teenagers today have a cellphone, often purchased by their parents so they can stay in closer touch. And parents are more likely than other adults to have a cellphone, for the same reason.

“The phone is now a huge part of parenting. It’s how you reach your kids,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist with the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life project. In a survey conducted in the summer of 2009, nearly 70 percent of teenagers said they talked on the phone with their parents at least once a day.

Now researchers are starting to zero in on how cellphone use affects the dynamic of the parent-child relationship. A paper published online on Monday in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking suggests that both the nature of the calls and who initiates the calls may affect relations.

Robert S. Weisskirch, a professor of human development at California State University in Monterey Bay, asked 196 parent-teenager pairs to tell him how frequently they made different types of calls. The teenagers were asked about 18 different types of situations or circumstances in which they might call parents and to rank them from “never” to “often.”

The calls fell into two basic categories: “ask and confer” calls, in which teenagers checked in with their parents to ask permission or tell a parent they would be late; and “social support” calls, made when they were upset, wanted advice or wanted to tell a parent they were happy and share some good news.

Parents were asked how often they called their children to monitor their whereabouts, track their schoolwork, check in with them and get an update — or express anger or dissatisfaction with something the teenager did.

Parents and teenagers also filled out questionnaires about their relationship, how close they were, how much conflict there was and how well they communicated.

What Dr. Weisskirch found wasn’t altogether surprising. When teenagers called parents frequently to “ask and confer,” it was better for their relationship, and they were more likely to characterize their parents as supportive and say they were close and communicated well. Parents were gratified by the calls, too; such calls seemed to boost their self-esteem.

“What I found generally was that when adolescents are initiating the communication and are seeking out social support and guidance from their parents, then almost across the board they tend to have better reports of getting along with their parents,” Dr. Weisskirch said.

On the other hand, when parents were initiating calls frequently to monitor their children’s whereabouts, track their homework or tell them they were upset, there was more conflict in the relationship, and the teenagers tended to have lower self-esteem. “When the parents call and have a lot of communication around ‘what are you doing?’ or ‘who are you with?’ or when they’re angry at the child and upset or scared, the kids report more conflict in the family,” he said.

Ultimately, the phone is just a tool that may augment the relationship but doesn’t substitute for it, he said. Still, he said, the phone may help during the transitional time of adolescence, when children are flexing their independence but tend to need guidance making decisions. “The phone has the potential to enhance parenting by giving parents an opportunity to provide guidance, even though they’re not face to face, and help their kids learn how to make good decisions,” he said.

But the phone can also increase tension, Ms. Lenhart said. “What this is making clear is that frequent calls from parents can be negative, that parents who are anxious and worried and constantly calling their child to monitor and ask about schoolwork or argue and try to discipline them — when you try to do the negative parts of parenting over the phone, it doesn’t work particularly well.”

Setting clear parameters for phone use from the outset may prevent conflict and mitigate misunderstandings, Dr. Weisskirch said. It is probably a good idea, for example, for parents to be very clear about what their expectations are about how often the teenager must make contact, he said, and to establish that not answering a parent’s call is not an option.

“The adolescent needs to know what’s expected of them, and how they’re supposed to use this technology that has crept into our lives,” he said.

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