College Students’ Parental Relationships and Psychological Well-Being

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 23. Young Adults, Family Relations, and Well-Being

Abstract

College is often a tumultuous period for emerging adults; full of changing family relationships, adjustment to adult responsibilities, and the onset of mental health issues for many young people. During this time, parents can be a source of general emotional support, provide specific advice, or provide little to no support. This paper investigates whether college students’ relationships with their mothers and fathers—specifically, frequency of talking and frequency of doing things together—affect students’ psychological well-being. This paper also addresses whether the association between students’ perceptions of their parental relationships and their psychological well-being varies by gender, class, and race/ethnicity. The data are from the Transition into Adulthood supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results show that students’ frequency of talking to their mothers about future plans is positively associated with psychological well-being, while frequency of talking to fathers and frequency of spending time doing things with mothers and fathers are not significant predictors of psychological well-being. Follow-up analyses reveal that frequency of talking to mothers about future plans positively predicts psychological well-being for students whose mothers are college educated and white students, but is unrelated to psychological well-being for first-generation, Black, and Latinx students. This suggests that parental relationships are another mechanism through which class and racial inequality is reproduced among college students.

Author

• Tanya Rouleau Whitworth, University of Massachusetts-Amherst