A Daily Examination of the Moderating Role of Adolescents’ Coping in Associations between Psychologically Controlling Parenting and Adolescents’ Maladjustment

Abstract

To explain why there is substantial heterogeneity in the degree to which adolescents suffer from psychologically controlling parenting, it is important to take into account adolescents' active contribution to the socialization processes and to their coping with controlling parenting in particular. This study aimed to examine whether adolescents' coping with controlling parenting (i.e., oppositional defiance, compulsive compliance, negotiation, and accommodation) moderated associations between psychologically controlling parenting, adolescents' experiences of psychological need frustration, and their internalizing and externalizing problems. A total of 161 adolescents (M age = 15.56 years; SD age = 1.14; 61.5% female) and either their mother or their father participated in 7-day diary study. As expected, accommodation played an adaptive role, thereby buffering within-person (daily) associations between psychologically controlling parenting, adolescents' need frustration, and subsequent problems. Unexpectedly, compulsive compliance played a similar adaptive role. Overall, the moderating effects of coping were rather limited, suggesting that adolescents' coping can alter the daily negative consequences associated with psychologically controlling parenting only to a certain extent. Psychologically Controlling ParentingPsychologically controlling parenting involves manipulative, pressuring, and sometimes subtle parental behaviors that interfere with the child's psychological and emotional experiences, such as guilt induction, shaming, and conditional regard (Barber, 1996). Because of the intrusive character of psychological control, it is assumed to be detrimental for adolescents' functioning (Barber & Harmon, 2002). Research has shown convincingly that psychologically controlling parenting is related to higher levels of adolescent problem behavior (see Pinquart, 2016, 2017 for meta-analyses). Adolescents who report higher levels of parental psychological control display more internalizing problems, such as depressive symptoms (Gargurevich & Soenens, 2016) and anxiety (McLeod et al., 2007), and more externalizing problems, such as aggression (Cui et al., 2014) and delinquent behavior (Liga et al., 2017).Recent studies have shown that psychologically controlling parenting is not entirely a stable parental children, thereby inducing feelings of inadequacy (competence frustration). Adolescents may also experience feelings of insecurity and alienation in the parent-adolescent relationship (relatedness frustration) because their parents' love and attention is conditional on the degree to which they attain their parents' standards (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010). Consistent with this reasoning, research has shown that frustration of adolescents' needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness plays an intervening role in associations between psychologically controlling parenting and adolescents' maladjustment, both in terms of internalizing problems and externalizing problems (Mabbe et al., 2016). On a daily level, diary st...

Psychological Control and Chinese Preschoolers’ Internalizing and Externalizing Problems: Bidirectional Associations in Four Parent-child Dyads

“…Moreover, girls typically demonstrate greater compliance and often prioritize preserving harmonious relationships over directly expressing their own feelings [53]. One study found that adolescents' coping styles (i.e., accommodation and compulsive compliance) played a moderating role in buffering the daily negative consequences associated with psychologically controlling parenting [54]. Therefore, in the present study, it is possible that girls' obedience played an adaptive role in buffering the negative effects of psychological control and decreasing their externalizing problems.…”