Poster #55 - Developmental cascade and transactional associations among Chinese parents' self-esteem, authoritarian parenting, and adolescents’ self-esteem

• In Event: Poster Session 08

Abstract

Self-esteem, defined as one’s appraisal of his or her value (Leary and Baumeister, 2000), was associated with the evaluation and feedback from
important others (e.g., parents, friends, and teachers). The interplay between a person and his or her social world constitutes a major part of how a person evaluates his/herself (James, 1890). However, the previous studies emphasized the influence of parental aspects (e.g., parents’ self-esteem level, parenting practices, and child-parent relationship) on a child’s self-esteem, and little research focused on the bidirectional relationships and the transactional mechanisms between them. In Asian culture, how parents, especially fathers, view themselves and what parenting practices they adopt during bringing up the child, play salient roles in the child’s self-esteem formation.
Using a three-wave longitudinal study, the present study extends prior research by examining the longitudinal linkages among Chinese parents’ self-esteem, parenting style, and adolescents’ self-esteem. Participants were N = 1460 junior school students (Mage = 16.04, SD = 0.34, 54% girls) in Shandong and Shanghai, P.R. China followed for over one and a half years, from the spring semester in 11th Grade to the fall semester in 12th grade. Measures of parents' self-esteem, authoritarian parenting, and adolescents’ self-esteem were obtained from a combination of self-reports and parents' ratings. Among the results:(1) compared with the unidirectional and bidirectional models, the developmental cascades models were deemed the best fit for the data; (2) earlier fathers' low self-esteem may lead to more authoritarian parenting practices and lower adolescents’ self-esteem later; (3) fathers’ authoritarian parenting mediated the long-lasting effect of fathers’ self-esteem on adolescents’ self-esteem; (3) adolescents’ self-esteem, directly and indirectly, contributed to greater mothers' self-esteem (More details could be seen in Fig.1 and Fig.2). The current study implied the bidirectional association between parents’ self-esteem and adolescents' self-esteem and revealed the differential transactional associations between father-child and mother-child in the Chinese context.

Authors

• Panpan Yang, Shanghai Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Dan Li, Shanghai Normal University

• Xuechen Ding

• Bohan Sun