Furthering the understanding of parent-child relationships: a nursing scholarship review series. Part 5: parent-adolescent and teen parent-child relationships.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine nursing's contribution to understanding the parent-adolescent and the teen parent-child relationships.

Conclusion: Relationships between parents and adolescents may reflect turmoil and affect adolescents' health and development. The social and developmental contexts for teen parenting are powerful and may need strengthening. Several interventions to help teen mothers interact sensitively with their infants have been developed and tested.

Practice Implications: Nurse researchers have begun to provide evidence for practitioners to use in caring for families of adolescents and teen parents to acquire interaction skills that, in turn, may promote optimal health and development of the child.