Early Adolescents' Perceptions of Mothers' and Fathers' Parenting Styles and Problem Behavior

Abstract

We investigated early adolescents' perceptions of parenting styles in mother–father–adolescent triads along with child self-reported problem behaviors (substance abuse and delinquency). We also examined the various combinations of mothers' and fathers' parenting styles by child gender in relation to problem behavior. Participants included 3,353 children (aged 12 to 14) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—97. Results from our structural equation model indicated that mothers and fathers may use different parenting strategies and that permissive parenting may not be as detrimental as previously assumed. In addition, youth perceptions of each parent were equally important in explaining problem behavior among both daughters and sons, but the perception of an authoritarian mother showed stronger adverse effects on sons, even after controlling for poverty and peer influence.

KEYWORDS:

• child gender
• delinquency
• early adolescents
• parenting
• parenting style
• problem behavior
• substance abuse

Notes

Values in parentheses are the number of observations.

^a Authoritative mother and father are the reference category and hence do not appear in the table.

^b na indicates that no significance test is possible because the unstandardized coefficient was fixed at 1.0 for identification purposes. ns, not significant.