The Influence of Parenting Styles on Adolescents’ Anxiety and Depression ---the Mediating Role of Self-Efficacy

Abstract

The relationship between parenting styles (PS) and anxiety and depressive symptoms is one of the key research topics today. Researchers have found progress in the cause of adolescents’ anxiety and depressive symptoms regarding parenting styles. However, there are still research gaps for factors related to PS. Therefore, this study investigates the effect of PS on adolescents’ anxiety and depressive symptoms and treats self-efficacy (SE) as the mediator by collecting data from several scales (SAS, SDS, s-EMBU-C and GSE) and conducting SPSS 21.0 analysis on the data. According to the results in this paper, the father’s emotional warmth parenting style (EWPS) could affect the level of anxiety, whereas that of the mother had an insignificant result. Besides, both parents’ EWS were negatively and indirectly correlated with depression in significance. Additionally, the rejection parenting style (RPS) and over-protection parenting style (OPPS) affected anxiety and depression significantly directly and positively (all p < 0.05). That result turned out to be insignificant in the indirect path. Generally, this research provides an appropriate suggestion to lower anxiety and depressive symptoms. The suggestion is to encourage parents to offer more emotional warmth to their children instead of being RPS and OPPS.