Mounts and Steinberg (1995) conducted a one-year longitudinal study of 500 ninth- through eleventh-graders to investigate the association between parenting styles and peer influence. The findings from this study suggest that an authoritative parenting style (e.g., warm, communicative rapport, appropriate discipline, et cetera) encourages the internalization of parental norms and their subsequent referencing in the adolescent's social interactions. The authors conclude that youth raised in this parenting style are more influenced by peers' positive behaviors, which are presumably behaviors valued by parents, and less influenced by peers' negative behaviors (Mounts & Steinberg, 1995).

However, in a longitudinal study of 116 sixth-graders, data showed that the when parents interact with and discipline their pre-adolescents in a responsive and warm way, the children develop better quality peer relationships (Fenzel, 2000).