Poster #82 - Parent Separation Anxiety and Adolescent Psychological Needs via Overprotective Parenting: Moderation by Parent Societal Fears

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Overprotective parenting, that is, age-inappropriate, intrusive parenting can be detrimental to emerging adult (EA) psychosocial development (Schriffrin et al., 2014), yet this link likely depends on different circumstances, such as when parents fear crime and society. With the inundation of fear-invoking news, such as social upheaval and crime (Nasi et al., 2021), many parents might worry more about the impending separation from their young adult children and parent in ways that protects them yet also threatens basic psychological needs - the need for autonomy, relatedness and competency (Flamant et al., 2022). Parent separation anxiety reflects parents’ responses to feeling sad at the loss of and anxious about being proximally and psychologically distanced from their child (Hock et al., 2001). Research demonstrates that it is associated positively with parents’ use of psychological control (Soenens et al., 2006) and inversely with separation-individuation, autonomous functioning, and identity development (Hock et al., 2001). Such fears of separation from EA children during the transition to college likely manifest in anxiety-driven overprotective parenting (Chevrier, et al., in press; Kins & Soenen, 2013) which also is associated with unmet basic psychological needs (Cook, 2020; Schriffrin et al., 2014; Van Petegem, et al., 2020). We propose that parents’ reports of their fear of society likely exacerbate some parents’ separation anxiety in predicting heightened anxiety-driven overprotective parenting thwarted EAs’ basic psychological needs. Thus, a moderated-mediated model was used to examine our hypotheses.
College-students (N = 307; 80.1% women) and their parents (N=307, 79.2% mothers) participated. College students completed measures of anxiety-driven overprotective parenting (MOPS - mean of anxious rearing, babying, premature problem-solving, and privacy invasion subscales; Kins et al., 2013) and a measure of basic psychological needs (SDT scale, Chen et al., 2014). EAs reports for mothers and fathers were combined into a single parent variable consisting of those reports for the parents who participated. Parents complete their perceptions of separation anxiety (Hock et al., 2001) and feelings of social in feelings of societal insecurity (De Groof, 2008).
In AMOS, three conditional process path analyses (Model 7; Hayes, 2012) were used to determine whether parental feelings of societal insecurity moderated the proposed mediational model. Model fit indices were acceptable (See Figure 1). Results of each model revealed that only when fear of societal insecurity was at the mean or high (+ 1SD) was the indirect effect of parent-reported higher separation anxiety through EAs’ reports of anxiety-driven overprotection to lessened EA autonomy, relatedness, and competence needs were revealed (Table 1). The indirect effects were not significant at -1 SD below the mean on fear of societal insecurity for each of the three types of basic needs (See Table 2). These results suggest that the perceived threat of crime and neighborhood danger are conditions that exacerbate overprotective parenting for those parents who are anxious about distancing from their EA with the associated outcome reflected in young adults whose needs for autonomy, developing satisfying relationships, and competently navigating the demands of college become stifled.

Authors

• Mary B Eberly Lewis, Oakland University
  Presenting Author

• Wendy M Rote, University of South Florida

• Meredith A McGinley, University of Wisconsin - Parkside