Parent-child discrepancies in warmth perceptions across middle childhood and early adolescence: A longitudinal person-centered investigation.

Parents and children often perceive their relationships differently, yet the developmental trajectories of these perceptual discrepancies are still not fully understood. The present longitudinal study examined heterogeneity in parent-child warmth perceptions across middle childhood to early adolescence. Using latent profile analysis, we identified distinct family types characterized by their 7-year trajectories of warmth levels and perceptual alignment. The participants were 1,906 German families from the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics study who completed annual assessments from Grades 3 to 9. At each grade, mothers, fathers, and children separately rated parental warmth, and children reported any emotional problems. Following the three-step Bolck-Croon-Hagenaars method (Bolck et al., 2004), five profiles emerged, based on latent level and discrepancy variables for both mother-child and father-child dyads across all grades: late-divergent (12.6%), stable-discrepant (24.5%), normative-adjusting (25.9%), mother-centered (16.7%), and warm-autonomous (20.3%). Profile membership predicted changes in children's emotional problems, with the late-divergent and mother-centered profiles showing significantly more initial emotional problems at Grade 3. The warm-autonomous and late-divergent profiles demonstrated significantly steeper declines in emotional problems from Grades 3 to 4, suggesting that high levels of warmth buffer against emotional difficulties during early childhood despite emerging discrepancies. Profile effects were most pronounced during early elementary school, with later changes being less differentiated by family pattern. The findings demonstrate that families follow qualitatively distinct longitudinal patterns of perceptual alignment that meaningfully predict child adjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).