The Relationship Between Family Communication Quality and the Career Maturity of Adolescents: The Role of Time Perspective

PURPOSE: Family communication quality is an influential factor of career maturity; however, very few studies have investigated the internal mechanisms underlying the relation between family communication quality and career maturity. This study investigated the mediating effect of time perspective on this relation, explored adolescents’ time perspective profiles, and examined the relationships among family communication quality, career maturity, and time perspective profiles. METHODS: In this one-year interval longitudinal study, adolescents (67.19% girls; aged 16.10–24.09 years; n = 442) reported parent-adolescent communication quality and time perspective at Time 1 and career maturity at Time 2. RESULTS: The results showed that family communication quality positively predicted adolescents’ career maturity, and this relation was mediated by adolescents’ Present Fatalistic and Future time perspectives. Additionally, this study identified four time perspective profiles: balanced, moderate, negative, and risk-taking. We further examined how these time perspective profiles are associated with family communication quality and career maturity. The results showed that adolescents’ perceptions of high-quality communication with their parents promoted them to endorse a balanced time perspective profile and protected them from endorsing a negative time perspective profile. Moreover, adolescents with a balanced time perspective profile exhibited better development in terms of career maturity, whereas those with a negative time perspective profile reported poor development in terms of career maturity. CONCLUSION: Present Fatalistic and Future time perspectives mediated the association between parent-adolescent communication quality and career maturity. Additionally, adolescents who engaged in high-quality communication with parents were more likely to endorse the balanced time perspective profile and less likely to adopt the negative time perspective profile; these adolescents were also more likely to achieve higher levels of career maturity. These findings highlight the necessity of improving parent-adolescent communication quality and guiding adolescents to establish a balanced time perspective profile with the goal of promoting adolescents’ career maturity.