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The present study examined the relative prediction and joint effects of maternal and paternal psychological control on children’s socioemotional development. A total of 325 preschool children between the ages of 34 and 57 months (
Parental psychological control refers to a set of intrusive parenting behaviors characterized by manipulation of children’s inner world such as guilt induction, love withdrawal, shaming, constraining children’s expressions, and stifling autonomy (
A number of existing research about parental psychological control has focused on mothers (e.g.,
Another question that requires further exploration is whether the adverse effects of parental psychological control may be generalized to different cultures. Some studies have suggested that parental psychological control may be more common in Eastern countries, such as China, than in Western societies (
Finally, the existing literature primarily has focused on parental psychological control and adolescent development. Psychological control undermines children’s autonomous function, thereby increasing the risk of social and psychological dysfunction (
Although the studies mentioned above included both parents’ psychological control, not all of them examined the joint effect or configuration (high or low levels of psychological control of both parents, or mixed levels of paternal and maternal psychological control) on children’s development. Therefore, the question remains of how children’s development may be impacted by discordant controlling parenting from their mothers and fathers.
With regard to the joint influences of parental psychological control, two distinct problems may be identified. The first is whether the existence of two highly psychologically controlling parents confers “dual risk” for children? The second is how the discordant parental psychological control (one parent employed high psychological control and another conducted low level of psychological control) influences the children development.
Although no research has been conducted to examine the combined effects of discordant parental psychological control on children development, several studies have examined concordant/discordant parenting patterns in relation to various constructs. For example,
In addition, the present study has two aims. First was to explore the relative predictive value of maternal and paternal psychological control on the socioemotional development of preschool children aged 2 to 5 in contemporary Chinese families, using the two indicators of behavioral problems and prosocial behaviors. Second was to investigate the joint effects of maternal and paternal psychological control on children’s socioemotional development.
Study subjects were recruited from four kindergartens in Beijing, the capital city of China. A total of 325 preschool children (169 girls and 156 boys) and their parents participated in the study. The selection criteria were as follows: (a) the parents were married and (b) the household was comprised of a nuclear family. One parent from each family provided written agreement to participate the research.
Child’s age and gender, parents’ education, monthly family income, and family subjective social status (SSS) were collected. A total of 313 of these parents provided their educational levels: 24.3% of the children’s mothers had a Master’s degree or higher = 3, 63.1% had a bachelor’s or vocational college degree = 2, 10% had secondary education or less = 1 (
A total of 308 of these parents provided their family monthly income: 6.8% of the families had monthly income no more than 6000 Yuan, 11.0% had monthly income from 6000 to 10000 Yuan, 31.5% had income from 10000 to 20000 Yuan, and 50.5% had monthly income more than 20000 Yuan. The
Subjective social status (SSS) was defined as the individual’s perception of his own position in the social hierarchy (
Psychological control was assessed with the Chinese version of the 18-item measure developed by
The 25-item Chinese version of Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was used to assess behavioral problems and prosocial behaviors as two indicators that reflected children’s socioemotional development levels. This scale was created by
We examined the correlations among the measured constructs and represented them in
Descriptive statistics and correlations for measures constructs.
Variables | Range | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Behavioral problema | 0.52 | 0.23 | [0.05, 1.20] | 1 | ||
Prosocial behaviora | 1.47 | 0.38 | [0.00, 2.00] | -0.34∗∗ | 1 | |
Maternal psychological controla | 2.13 | 0.59 | [1.00, 3.67] | 0.31∗∗ | -0.14∗ | 1 |
Paternal psychological controla | 2.21 | 0.63 | [1.00, 3.72] | 0.18∗∗ | -0.08 | 0.38∗∗ |
To examine the associations between the measured structures and demographic characteristics, we conducted analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with maternal and paternal psychological control, children’s behavioral problems and prosocial behaviors as the respective dependent variables and child gender, maternal and paternal education, and SSS as the between-subject factors. In terms of prosocial behaviors, the main effect of child gender was significant, with girls exhibiting more prosocial behaviors than boys (
To examine the difference between maternal and paternal psychological control, a paired-samples
Classification of maternal and paternal psychological control.
Paternal psychological control | |||
---|---|---|---|
Maternal psychological control | High-score group | Low-score group | Total |
81 | 50 | 131 | |
70 | 124 | 194 | |
151 | 174 | 325 | |
Descriptive statistics for children’s socioemotional development is displayed in
Descriptive statistics for children’s socioemotional development.
Outcomes | Classification ( |
||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Total | LF-LM | LF-HM | HF-LM | HF-HM | |||||||
( |
( |
( |
( |
||||||||
Behavioral problems | 0.52 | 0.23 | 0.44 | 0.23 | 0.58 | 0.23 | 0.53 | 0.21 | 0.60 | 0.23 | 9.90∗∗∗ |
Prosocial behavior | 1.47 | 0.38 | 1.51 | 0.42 | 1.46 | 0.35 | 1.50 | 0.33 | 1.39 | 0.39 | 1.62 |
The data collected showed some interesting findings. The main effects of the organization of parental psychological control were significant for children behavioral problems [
The estimated marginal means and 95% CIs for prosocial behaviors were 1.51 [1.44, 1.57] for the children with both less controlling parents, 1.46 [1.35, 1.57] for the children with highly controlling mothers and less controlling fathers, 1.49 [1.40, 1.59] for the children with less controlling mothers and highly controlling fathers, and 1.39 [1.31, 1.48] for children with both highly controlling parents. Psychological control classifications did not significantly impact prosocial behaviors [
To examine the relative prediction and combined effects of maternal and paternal psychological control, hierarchical multiple regressions for each of the children’s socioemotional outcomes were conducted. The data were standardized before regression analysis and the simple size was 325. First, the child’s gender (0 = boy, 1 = girl) and SSS (the missing data were replaced by means) was entered, followed by maternal and paternal psychological control scores, and finally, the interaction terms of maternal and paternal psychological control in order to examine the combined effects of parental psychological control. The results were reported in
Regression analysis for parental psychological control predicting children’s socioemotional outcomes.
Predictors | Behavioral problemsa | Prosocial behaviorsa | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
β | Δ |
β | Δ |
|||||||
Gender | -0.03 [-0.09, 0.02] | 0.03 | -0.07 | 0.04 | 0.04∗∗ | 0.12 [0.03, 0.20] | 0.04 | 0.15* | 0.02 | 0.02∗ |
SSS | -0.03 [-0.05, -0.02] | 0.01 | -0.19* | 0.01 [-0.02, 0.04] | 0.02 | 0.03 | ||||
MPC | 0.06 [0.04, 0.09] | 0.01 | 0.27* | 0.13 | 0.09∗∗∗ | -0.04 [-0.09, 0.00] | 0.02 | -0.11+ | 0.04 | 0.02+ |
FPC | 0.01 [-0.01, 0.04] | 0.01 | 0.05 | -0.01 [-0.06, 0.03] | 0.02 | -0.04 | ||||
MPC × FPC | -0.03 [-0.05, -0.00] | 0.01 | -0.11* | 0.14 | 0.01∗ | 0.02 [-0.03, 0.06] | 0.02 | 0.49 | 0.04 | 0.00 |
Follow-up simple slopes analysis was explored (
The joint effect of paternal and maternal psychological control (paternal psychological control as the independent variable and maternal psychological control as the moderator).
The joint effect of paternal and maternal psychological control (maternal psychological control as the independent variable and maternal psychological control as the moderator).
This study examined the predictive power and combined effects of maternal and paternal psychological control on the socioemotional development of preschool children 2–5 years of age in China.
Despite some researchers considered psychological control as a commonly used or acceptable parenting and thought it could promote children’s moral socialization (
The most striking findings were the differential effects of paternal and maternal psychological control. Results revealed that higher maternal psychological control could predict more behavioral problems significantly and less prosocial behaviors marginally significantly. There were no parallel findings for paternal psychological control. These results could imply that the effects of maternal psychological control on children’s socioemotional competence were more clear and robust than the effects of paternal psychological control in China. These findings were not consistent with previous research in other countries. For example, a cross-cultural study, which examined the association between parental psychological control and depressive symptoms in Belgian and South Korean adolescents, showed that both maternal and paternal psychological controls were significant indicators for childhood depression (
Several explanations for the lesser effect of paternal psychological control could be offered. First, the involvement of Chinese fathers in early childhood was still low. Most fathers were engaged in work and spend less time with family and children. A study conducted in China reported that 78.5% fathers spend less than 2 h with their children every day. In 67.8% of families, mothers or grandparents were the main caregivers for preschool children (Wei, 2013, Unpublished). Therefore, the paternal controlling parenting may exert relatively weaker effects on preschool children’s socioemotional development. Second, several studies suggested that maternal and paternal parenting might have differential influence on various aspects of a child’s development (
The results of this study suggested that there was no difference among the four groups with regard to prosocial behaviors. However, children whose parents employed less psychological control showed less behavioral problems than children in the other three groups. The findings indicated that children would be at risk for behavioral problems as long as one parent engaged in high levels of psychological control. Moreover, the interaction of paternal and maternal psychological control was significant for the prediction of children’s behavioral problems. The graphical representation of the interaction clearly suggested that a combination of less psychological control by both parents resulted in the fewest behavioral problems. Interestingly, the effect with maternal control as the primary agent and paternal control as the moderator suggested that maternal psychological control was consistently and positively associated with children’s behavioral behaviors no matter the character of paternal psychological control. In contradistinction, paternal control as the main agent and maternal control as the moderator showed that an increase of paternal psychological control was associated with an increase of behavioral problems when maternal psychological control was low. However, that was not the case when maternal psychological control was high. These results contribute to an understanding of the specific mechanisms at work with paternal and maternal psychological control. Maternal psychological control exerts a consistently negative effect on children’s development. Paternal psychological control matters only in conjunction with less maternal psychological control.
Although the current study provided a better understanding of the different effects of paternal and maternal psychological control, several limitations of this study should be noted. First, the cross-sectional nature of the current study prevents us to clear the direction of effects between parental controlling parenting and children’s developmental problems. Longitudinal research would be needed to test the causal relationships among these variables. Second, the sample was relatively homogenous. All of them were recruited from Beijing, the political, economic, and cultural center of China. Almost half of the families jointed the study were at high socioeconomic status. Parents showed relatively low level of psychological control and children were well-behaved. Therefore, the low level of variability of variables reduced the ecological validity of this study. Future studies could make a complete examination of parental psychological control and children development in heterogeneous population. Third, the data on parental psychological control and children’s socioemotional development were obtained from parental self-reports; the relationships identified could reflect common method variance. Therefore, future studies could utilize different measuring tools and informants to assure greater validity of the results. Fourth, the possible interplay between parenting and children’s characteristics could exist. The differential susceptibility hypothesis assumes that some children have high developmental plasticity and will be more affected by parenting experiences than others due to their own characteristics (e.g., temperamental, physiological, or genetics;
Despite these limitations, several strengths of the study merit mention. First, the research benefited from data collected on psychological control by both mothers and fathers from the same families. This provided the opportunity to examine the relative effect and joint effects of paternal and maternal psychological control on children’s socioemotional development. Second, the findings expanded upon existing knowledge regarding paternal psychological control and children’s development, and contributed a greater understanding of the practical implications. Parental psychological control had adverse effects on preschool children’s socioemotional development in Chinese culture. The children were at the high risk of behavioral problems as long as one parent exerts high level of psychological control. Therefore, we recommend that both parents, especially mothers, should reduce their controlling parenting and employ more adaptive parenting to promote children’s socioemotional development.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Research Ethics Committee of Capital Normal University with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Capital Normal University.
SX and XL conceived and designed the study. XG, XS, DZ, MZ, and BD performed the collection of data. XG analyzed and interpreted the data. SX, XL, and XG completed and modified the manuscript. MA provided language editing for the manuscript.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.