The relationship of parent personality to child psychopathology has been investigated in numerous studies over the past three decades, using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). To investigate response patterns of both parents and offspring, the MMPI responses of 197 families with adolescents entering inpatient or outpatient settings (N=555) were examined. Principal diagnoses for the outpatient sample were personality, academic and cognitive, and conduct and adjustment disorders and for the inpatient sample were dysthymic, personality, and conduct disorders. The results indicated that inpatient parents and adolescents had significantly higher mean scores across a variety of MMPI scales than did their outpatient counterparts. The linear combination of adolescent and maternal MMPI scale data, in a stepwise discriminative function analysis, resulted in accurate classification of 75 percent of all children in inpatient treatment and 74 percent of all children assigned to outpatient treatment. Results of the chi-square analyses indicated that the occurrence of clinical range maternal profiles was significantly related to an increased frequency of marked clinical profiles for both male and female offspring. The findings support the importance of treatment efforts which are responsive to the psychological features of the parents as well as the symptomatology of the adolescent. (LLL)