From Daily Need Experiences to Autonomy-Supportive and Psychologically Controlling Parenting via Psychological Availability and Stress

SYNOPSIS

Objective. This study sought to identify processes linking daily parental need experiences to daily parenting, focusing on the intervening role of parental psychological availability and stress. Design. In total, 206 mothers (Mage = 40.33 years) and 206 fathers (Mage = 42.36 years) and their elementary school child (Mage = 9.93 years; 46.6% female) participated in a 7-day multi-informant diary study. Results. Parents’ daily need satisfaction was related to more daily psychological availability and lower daily stress in parent-child interactions, but parental need frustration related to less daily psychological availability and more stress. Psychological availability and stress were related to more daily parent-reported and child-perceived autonomy support and psychological control, respectively. However, parental need-based experiences were related to children’s reported parenting only indirectly (i.e., through psychological availability and stress). These associations were obtained at the within-day level but not in models predicting parenting the next day. Conclusion. Parental need-based experiences are a critical resource for parenting.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles: The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Funding: This work was supported by Grant 12X5818N from the Research Foundation Flanders [12X5818N].

Role of the Funders/Sponsors: None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments: The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions or the funding agency is not intended and should not be inferred.

Notes

¹ More specifically, having more children related to less psychological availability and less parent-reported autonomy support and less child-reported maternal autonomy support. For only fathers did having more children relate to less need frustration and stress and more need satisfaction. For mothers, age of the child related to less need satisfaction and more child-perceived psychological control, whereas for fathers age of the child related to more need satisfaction and parent-reported autonomy support but also more stress and less psychological availability. Further, mothers experienced more need satisfaction with boys, whereas fathers experienced more stress with girls and reported a higher level of autonomy support with boys. Parents’ education related to most variables, with a lower education relating to a lower level of positive outcomes (e.g., less autonomy support) and to a higher level of negative outcomes (e.g., more psychological control). For fathers, their own age related to more autonomy support and less psychological control (both according to their report and the child report) and to less stress. Finally, for fathers being married (vs. not being married) related to less need satisfaction, child-perceived autonomy support, and parent-reported psychological control and to more need frustration, stress, and child-reported psychological control.

² We also tested a model wherein all the paths in Model 1 were reversed. It is possible that the degree to which a parent experiences need satisfaction and need frustration follows from experiences with the child. Specifically, if parents are more psychological available for their child, they may be better capable of getting their psychological needs met. Contrariwise, if parents are stressed themselves, they could possibly experience greater need frustration. In general, all paths in this reversed model were in the expected direction and significant and the fit of the model was adequate (χ²/df = 4.15; CFI = .98; SRMR = .05; RMSEA = .04). Based on these findings, daily need-related experiences and parents’ daily psychological availability and stress seem to be related reciprocally. Future experimental research is, however, needed to sort out the direction of effects.

³ In response to a suggestion by an anonymous reviewer, we analyzed whether the relations between psychological availability and parenting could be quadratic (rather than linear). By adding psychological availability-squared (i.e., the quadratic term) as a predictor of the parenting variables to the Models 3a (parent-reported parenting) and 3b (child-reported parenting) we found that psychological availability-squared related significantly only to parent-reported psychological control (β = −.09; p = .001), but not to the other parenting variables (β ranging between −.06 and .01, ps > .05). Specifically, results showed that with both low and high levels of psychological availability parents reported a lower level of psychological control. Thus, perhaps parents who score low on psychological availability are too absent too be able to pressure the child and would be more inclined to act in a permissive way. Future research is needed to further explore this relation.

⁴ We also explored the role of the child’s behavior, as parents also reported daily on the child’s externalizing problems (i.e., aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors; 7 items), withdrawn behavior (3 items), and prosocial behavior (3 items). These items were selected from the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) on the basis of their suitability for a diary format. We analyzed four additional models to examine the role of these three child behaviors in the prediction of parental psychological availability and stress (2 models) or in the prediction of autonomy supportive and psychologically controlling parenting (2 models). Two main findings emerged from these analyses. First, all significant relations that were found in the final models (i.e., Model 4a and 4b) were also found to be significant in these additional models wherein we controlled for child behavior. Second, in about half of the investigated paths (i.e., 10 out of 24) did child behavior relate significantly to the intervening or outcome variables with withdrawn behavior being the strongest predictor. That is, withdrawn behavior related positively to parental stress (β = .18, p < .001) and psychological control (parent report: β = .26, p < .001; child report: β = .09, p < .05) and related negatively to child-reported autonomy support (β = −.09, p < .01). Surprisingly, however, externalizing problems related positively to psychological availability (β = .12, p < .001) and parent-reported autonomy support (β = .11, p < .001), while prosocial behavior related positively to stress (β = .07, p < .05). Importantly, these findings showed that the main associations in our hypothesized model were not cancelled out when taking into account the child’s behavior.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grant 12X5818N from the Research Foundation Flanders [12X5818N].