The aim of this paper is to explore the direct and indirect, via one specific parental behavior, effects of work-family conflict among mothers and fathers on life satisfaction of adolescents. Data used in the paper are collected in a two-wave longitudinal study conducted within the research project „Parents’ work, family economic hardship and well-being of parents and children”. In this paper, only data collected from 285 Croatian adolescents (aged between 11 and 17 years ; 61.8% girls) who live in two-parent families are used. Adolescents completed the Parental Punishment subscale of the Parental Behavior Questionnaire (Keresteš et al., 2012) in the first wave and the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Selingson et al., 2003) in both waves of data collection. Mothers and fathers completed the Work-Family Conflict Scale (Netemeyer et al., 1996) in the first wave. The results show that both mother’s and father’s use of harsh punishment was related to lower levels of life satisfaction in adolescents. The results of path analyses indicate that mother’s experience of work- family conflict is only directly related to the lower life satisfaction of adolescents, while father’s experience of work-family conflict is only indirectly, via fathers’ use of harsh punishment, related to lower life satisfaction of adolescents. This pattern of relations between mother’s and father’s work-family conflict, parental punishment and life satisfaction holds regardless when life satisfaction was measured. The findings of this study provide support for the effects of parental work and behavior on adolescent well- being and indicate certain differences in the effects of mother’s and father’s work-family conflict.

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