A Multimethod Examination of the Associations between Parenting Styles and Self-Regulation among Ethnically Diverse Emerging Adults
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Date
2020-01-01
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Department
Psychology
Program
Psychology
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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Abstract
Self-regulation refers to individuals' capacity for managing and regulating their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in response to contextual demands to enable goal-oriented actions. Parents play a significant role in self-regulation development, and most research on this topic has focused on toddlerhood, childhood and adolescence. However, research suggests that self-regulation continues to mature after adolescence and becomes particularly important during emerging adulthood as individuals make important life decisions that require autonomous regulation of themselves. Nevertheless, knowledge on emerging adults' self-regulation and its connection to parenting is limited. Therefore, across three papers, this dissertations project aimed to broaden our knowledge by: (1) investigating the relation between parenting style and emerging adults' self-regulation, (2) exploring whether self-regulation mediated the association between parenting style and emerging adults' psychological distress, (3) comparing between Asian American and European American emerging adults to discover culturally-shared and culturally-unique pathways between parenting, self-regulation, and psychological health. Paper 1 compared Asian American and European American emerging adults on their perceived parenting style from their parents, self-regulation, and the associations between parenting style and self-regulation. Paper 2 examined the factorial structure of the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SSRQ) and tested the SSRQ's measurement invariance using an ethnically diverse emerging adult sample. Finally, Paper 3 examined whether self-regulation served as a mediator that might explain the association between parenting style and emerging adults' psychological distress and further considered parent-child conflict as a potential moderator in this mediating process.
The cumulative knowledge from the three studies provided empirical evidence that self-regulation is an important skill that contributes to psychological health among emerging adults. Moreover, these findings indicated the continued influence of parenting on self-regulation during emerging adulthood and informed our theoretical understanding by revealing specific mechanisms that explain or moderate the association between parenting and emerging adults' psychological health. By identifying self-regulation as the mediator between parenting style and emerging adults' psychological distress and revealing that high levels of parent-child conflict can undermine positive parenting on self-regulation development, our findings can have important implications for future clinical practice that involves emerging adults and their parents.