Do Parenting Styles Moderate the Association Between Family Conformity Orientation and Young Adults' Mental Well-Being?

Abstract

This study investigated parenting styles (i.e., authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive) as moderators of the association between family conformity orientation and young adults' self-esteem and depression. Participants included 213 young adult children. Preliminary analyses revealed an inverse association between family conformity and young adults' self-esteem, a positive relationship between mothers' and fathers' authoritativeness and self-esteem, and a positive relationship between perceptions of mothers' permissiveness and young adults' depression. Hierarchical regression analyses provided no evidence to suggest that parenting styles moderate the association between family conformity orientation and young adults' self-esteem and depression. However, the results revealed small, but meaningful positive effects for both mothers' and fathers' authoritativeness on young adults' self-esteem, as well as a positive main effect for family conformity on depression. Two additional analyses of covariance revealed that young adults from pluralistic families had higher self-esteem and lower depression than young adults from protective, laissez faire, and consensual families.

Acknowledgments

This article was accepted under the editorship of Caryn Medved.

Notes

¹The initial sample included nine young adults for whom one of their parents was deceased, as well as 41 young adults from divorced families. Given the potential variability introduced by divorce and an insufficient sample size to conduct appropriate statistical comparisons, the sample was reduced to include only young adult children from first-marriage families.

²Although our primary goal in this report was to test the degree to which parenting styles moderated the association between family conformity orientation and young adults' mental well-being, one reviewer requested that we include family conversation orientation in the analyses for H1 given the small, but meaningful correlation between conformity and conversation orientations. A separate set of regression analyses were conducted, and after controlling for conversation orientation, the results provided no evidence to suggest that parenting styles moderated the association between conformity and well-being (i.e., self-esteem and depression). Consequently, we reported the original analyses to reduce multicollinearity in the regression models and to provide a more parsimonious set of results.

³According to Koerner and Fitzpatrick (2002a), if two or more variables consistently interact with one another in their relationships with dependent variables (e.g., conversation and conformity orientations), then ordinalizing those variables to create a typology makes conceptual and empirical sense. Likewise, they urged researchers using small samples that are not randomly selected to classify families in their samples based on the population means reported by Fitzpatrick and Ritchie (1994). Consequently, we simplified our analysis and tested our hypothesis by classifying our participants into family types and conducting ANCOVAs.

⁴As an alternative, we could have tested our hypothesis by conducting multiple regression models and including all two-way and higher-order interaction effects. However, given the nonindependence present in our data (i.e., mother's and father's parenting styles), as well as the number of interaction effects needed to properly test such models, we chose instead to use ANCOVA. ANCOVA enabled us to estimate the unique and combined effects of FCPs and parenting styles on self-esteem and depression, while accounting for the interactions of conversation and conformity, and warmth and control behaviors, in a more parsimonious manner.