Emerging Adults’ and Parents’ Perceptions of Supportive Parenting: Associations with Family and Parent-Child Relationship Quality

• In Event: Predictors of Parenting Processes and Parent-Child Relationship Quality across Four Developmental Periods

Abstract

Parents play an important role in socializing children’s emotional experiences and teaching children how to regulate their negative emotions (Calkins & Perry, 2016). Indeed, parental responses to children’s emotions have been associated with a variety of socioemotional outcomes across childhood and emerging adulthood (e.g., Johnson et al., 2010). Parenting may be important in emerging adulthood (EA), defined as between ages 18 to 25 (Arnett, 2000), as much as in childhood because EA is a challenging time of transitions when individuals experience stress and adjustment problems at increasing rates (e.g., Asberg el al., 2008). Notably, parents’ and children’s reports of parenting are often incongruent, with parents reporting themselves more favorably (Korelitz & Garber, 2016). The extent to which these discrepancies in perceptions of parenting predict parent-child and family relationship quality later in development, however, has not been extensively studied. This study examined the extent to which EAs’ perceptions of their parents when they were children predict their relationship with their parents when they are older.

Participants were 79 emerging adults (M = 19.8 years, SD = 1.38; 83.1% female) and their primary caregiver. EA participants were 57.6% White, 36.4% Latinx, 0.8% African American, and 5% selected another or more than one race. EAs completed an online survey for course credit, and provided contact information for their primary caregiver. Parents were contacted via email to complete an online survey. EAs and their parent completed the Supportive and Unsupportive subscales of the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions (Fabes et al., 2002), which provided a retrospective report about the parents’ responses to their child’s negative emotions during childhood. The EA also completed the Family Environment Scale (Moos & Moos, 2002), and the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment Scale (Greenberg et al., 1984).

Regression models using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018) were conducted to examine the extent to which discrepancies in EA and their parents’ perceptions of parenting (i.e., parents’ responses to child negative emotion) were associated with EA’s current perceptions of the quality of parent-child and family relationships. The results showed that greater discrepancies between EAs’ and parents’ reports of parent’s unsupportive responses predicted lower current family relationship quality, b = -1.94, SE = 0.76, p = .01. There was a main effect of EAs’ perceptions of supportive parent responses to their negative emotions in childhood predicting higher levels of EA-reported parent-child relationship quality, b = 5.49, SE = 1.52, p = .001.

The results suggest that when EAs and parents agree that the parent was unsupportive of their child’s negative emotions in childhood, EAs rated the family relationship quality as worst. Moreover, when EAs remembered their parents as responding supportively to their negative emotions in childhood, they rated their current relationship with their parents as better. These findings emphasize the importance of considering the implications of parents’ and youths’ perceptions of parenting on parent-child and family relationship quality. Future research should examine potential differences between parents (e.g., mother-child vs. father-child), and other implications of parent-child discrepancies for adjustment across development.

Authors

• Sharyl E Wee, Southern Methodist University
  Presenting Author

• Naomi Ekas, Texas Christian University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chrystyna D Kouros, Southern Methodist University
  Non-Presenting Author