Successful parent-adolescent communication is crucial to a young person's well-being and development, but family communication during adolescence is particularly challenging. One type of conversation employs invitational rhetoric, which describes communication where the goal is not to persuade, but to exchange perspectives by creating an atmosphere that establishes safety, value, and freedom. Up to now invitational rhetoric has been used to understand public communication from a rhetorical perspective, but we apply this theory to family communication. To understand invitational rhetoric in families, participants (N = 113) completed a qualitative questionnaire about communication with their parents. Using the critical incident technique participants provided a detailed narrative about a time that they and a parent had a successful conversation about a difficult topic. The results provide a blueprint for understanding what young adults perceive as contributing to invitational conversations with their parents.
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