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The influence of paternal and maternal parenting styles on adolescents’ regulatory focus: A longitudinal study

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Abstract

To strengthen the evidence for the developmental assumption of regulatory focus theory, that individuals’ chronic self-regulatory orientations root in parenting behaviors, the present study investigated the influences of maternal and paternal parenting styles on Chinese adolescents’ regulatory focus and the effects of regulatory focus on mental health using an 8-month longitudinal design. 466 Chinese middle and high school students completed the regulatory focus, perceived maternal and paternal parenting style, life satisfaction, and positive and negative social adjustment measures. The results showed that: (1) Adolescents’ promotion focus positively predicted life satisfaction and positive social adjustment and negatively predicted negative social adjustment. Prevention focus positively predicted negative social adjustment. (2) Maternal emotional warmth positively predicted promotion focus, whereas paternal harsh discipline positively predicted prevention focus. (3) Promotion focus mediated the relationship between maternal emotional warmth and life satisfaction and positive and negative social adjustment. Prevention focus mediated the relationship between paternal harsh discipline and negative social adjustment.

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Notes

  1. To ensure that this deletion will not alter the research results, we reran all the analyses including the data from 14 participants from one-parent families (9 missing paternal data and 5 missing maternal data). The results of the path estimates were essentially identical with the original ones.

  2. Participants from grade 9 and grade 12 were excluded because they would graduate from their school soon and would therefore not be available for the second survey.

  3. Even though we followed previous studies among Chinese adolescents (e.g., Wang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2019) in using adolescents’ report on family income, teenagers may not know their family income accurately. To ensure that this family income indicator was reliable, we replaced monthly family income with participants’ report on whether living in their own house (1 = no and 2 = yes) as one of the indicators of SES (Boyce et al., 2006; Mao & Zhao, 2012). We found that the new synthesized family SES and the original SES had a very high correlation (r = .97, p < .001). We then reran all our analyses and found that the results were essentially identical with the original results. Therefore, we retain the family income information as one of the indicators of family SES.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Funding

This research was supported by grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (grant No. 17CSH072).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sociology, China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China

    Qin Gao, Xueling Wan & Hongzhe Wei

  2. Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, 19 Xinjiekouwai St., Haidian District, Beijing, 100875, China

    Ran Bian

  3. Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Huiying Qiu

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  1. Qin Gao
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  2. Ran Bian
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Correspondence to Ran Bian.

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Gao, Q., Bian, R., Wan, X. et al. The influence of paternal and maternal parenting styles on adolescents’ regulatory focus: A longitudinal study. Curr Psychol 42, 1870–1880 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01569-y

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