Family Socialization and Chinese Youth Children’s Development: Does psychosocial Maturity Matter?

Abstract

The present study examined the effects of family socialization in the form of family processes and parenting practices on youth children’s internalizing and externalizing problems concomitantly in a sample of Chinese parent–child dyads. The results generally support that (1) family socialization is crucially influential on the youth outcomes, in which parenting is a function of family processes; (2) youth’s psychosocial maturity significantly mediates the effects of family socialization on their outcomes; (3) effects of family processes are observed more pronounced as compared with parenting practices; and (4) more complicatedly varying effects of family processes and parenting practices on the youth outcomes appear when setting free the mediations of psychosocial maturity across different structural models. Service implications of the findings and future research directions are briefly discussed.

Keywords:

• family socialization
• internalizing and externalizing problems
• psychosocial maturity

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In Hong Kong, the geographical area is divided into three main regions, namely Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. As due to the total voluntary basis of participation and consideration of enhancing representativeness of the sample, we had tried best to invite local churches (data collection units) locating in different geographical places to participate in the study. Consequently, there were 16 data collection units locating in Hong Kong Island, 13 units in Kowloon, and 14 units in the New Territories, a total of 43 data collection units, that agreed to help recruitment potential parent–child dyads. As a result, 87 and 65 parent–child dyads came from Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, respectively, and the remaining 71 pairs were from New Territories.

2 The equation for doing this test is $t(n-2)=\frac{r\sqrt{n-2}}{\sqrt{1+r^2}}$, in which under the null hypothesis the population correlation may equals zero, the quantity would have a t distribution with n − 2 degrees of freedom, where n is the number of paired scores. The t value obtained from the equation is determined whether it exceeds the critical values for t distribution