Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Poster #163 - Is growing up affluent a developmental risk for Hong Kong Chinese youth?

Fri, March 22, 7:45 to 9:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Popular media suggests that adolescents raised in affluent families are at elevated risk for poor psychological outcomes because parenting behaviors characteristic of wealthy parents undermine their basic psychological needs. However, empirical evidence supporting this theory has been scarce and limited to affluent Caucasian families in the United States. The purpose of the study was to examine whether adolescents raised in Hong Kong Chinese families show similar patterns of elevated risk for psychological maladjustment and to explore how parenting behaviors and cultural orientation are associated with youth outcomes. Using survey data obtained from 153 parent-child dyads, the study found that adolescents from affluent Hong Kong Chinese families reported higher levels of internalizing problems, but lower levels of externalizing problems, compared to national norms, with more than half of the female and a third of the male adolescents reporting borderline clinical level internalizing symptoms. In addition, almost twice as many females reported borderline clinical and clinical levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors compared to males. In contrast, except for elevated somatic complaints in female adolescents, parents generally reported mean scores for problem behaviors that were similar to or lower than national norms. Results from the study also showed that associations among parent achievement expectations, overparenting, and parent-child engagement (i.e., parent criticism and maternal warmth) and youth outcomes varied across gender. Across both genders, parent criticism was positively associated with youth-reported internalizing problems. Maternal warmth was negatively associated with youth-reported internalizing and externalizing problems for females; and overparenting was positively associated with internalizing and externalizing problems for males. Parent-child engagement was also associated with parent-reported problem behaviors in female adolescents. Finally, the study found that youth adherence to Chinese cultural values moderated the relations among parenting behaviors and youth psychological adjustment. For males with strong adherence to Chinese cultural values, parent-reported internalizing and externalizing problems increased with higher levels of overparenting; whereas for males with low adherence to Chinese cultural values, parent-reported internalizing problems decreased with higher levels of overparenting. For females with low adherence to Chinese cultural values, parent-reported internalizing problems decreased with higher levels of academic expectations and increased with higher levels of parent criticism. The findings suggest that (1) growing up affluent appears to be a developmental risk for Hong Kong Chinese adolescents, with females more “at risk” for psychological maladjustment than males; however, the pattern of problem behaviors manifested in these youth vary from previous Western samples which may be a consequence of differing cultural norms; (2) parents appear unaware of their children’s psychological distress; therefore, although their families may have the financial means to afford mental health resources, these youth may not have access to the services they need; (3) in contrast to existing research on Western samples, achievement expectations are less of a risk factor for Hong Kong Chinese adolescents; however, poor parent-child engagement and overparenting tend to predict negative outcomes; (4) youth adherence to Chinese cultural values appears to sensitize males to negative outcomes associated with overparenting and buffer females against parent criticism.

Authors