Poster #154 - Psychologically Controlling Parenting Predicts Intra-Individual Decrements in Self-Regulation across Adolescence

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parents are uniquely influential in their adolescents’ development of self-regulation. According to Self Determination Theory (SDT; Soenens et al., 2010), parents’ psychological control is a particularly detrimental parenting practice in regards to adolescents’ development of self-regulation. Unique from overtly harsh parenting (e.g., verbal hostility), psychological control is a subtle attempt for coercive control that relies on emotionally manipulative tactics, ultimately preserving the child’s psychological dependence on his/her parent (Barber & Harmon, 2002). Thus, SDT would posit that psychological control undermines adolescents’ opportunities for self-directed functioning, and thus opportunities for practicing and developing self-regulation (Oudekerk et al., 2015). Although a handful of cross-sectional studies have established an association between parents’ psychological control and indices of self-regulation, no studies of which we are aware have looked at these associations longitudinally nor have they tested for directionality of effects. Using autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals (ALT-SR; Berry & Willoughby, 2017), we examined the intra-individual and prospective associations between psychologically controlling parenting and adolescents’ self-regulation from ages 11 – 17, as well as sex differences in these associations (boys versus girls, mothers versus fathers). We predicted that mothers’ and fathers’ psychological control would predict prospective, within-person decreases in adolescents’ self-regulation, and that these effects would be more or less equal for boys and girls.
Data were gathered on 500 families (target child and parents) from the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Families were interviewed annually from ages 11 to 17 (Mage = 11.21, SD = .96; 337 two-parent families, 163 single-parent families; 65.4% European American, 12.2% African American, 18.2% multi-ethnic). At each assessment, adolescents reported on their mothers’ and fathers’ psychologically controlling parenting and their own self-regulation; parents reported on their children’s self-regulation at each assessment, as well as their own overt, harsh parenting practices (verbal hostility, physical punishment). Separate ALT-SR models were estimated for mothers’ and fathers’ psychological control and for parent- and child- informants, resulting in four models. Invariance testing was used to determine if these associations were constant across time (ages 11 – 17) and adolescents’ sex.
Results are displayed in Figures 1 and 2. In all models, parents’ greater psychological control predicted within-person decreases in self-regulation one year later, controlling for prior levels of self-regulation. Across all four models, results were consistent in terms of their significance, direction of effects, and relative effect size; were invariant across time (ages 11 – 17); were mostly invariant across sex; and persisted above and beyond parents’ harsh discipline. Associations in the opposite direction were mostly non-significant: adolescents’ self-regulation generally did not predict within-person change in psychological control, except in one father model where it predicted greater psychological control for girls. Together, a clear pattern emerged in support of SDT’s postulations that psychological control should be uniquely associated with adolescents’ self-regulation, regardless of age or sex, and above and beyond other harsh forms of parenting. The discussion will describe the study’s theoretical contributions regarding parenting and self-regulation, and provide recommendations for family-based interventions.

Authors

• Adam A. Rogers, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• Madison Memmott-Elison, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura M Padilla-Walker, Brigham Young University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Byon, Brigham Young University
  Non-Presenting Author