Good self-control is associated with numerous positive life outcomes. In childhood, parenting is a critical factor that facilitates the development of self-control. However, after moving into adolescence, young people are surrounded by various self-control challenges. In the meanwhile, they desire more autonomy and independence from, and are more likely to have conflicts with, parents. On the other hand, adolescents’ self-control affects their developmental outcomes, which further evokes parents to adjust parenting strategies in response. Studies that examine the relationship between parenting and adolescent self-control have yielded inconsistent findings. This is why we carried out a meta-analysis to investigate the overall association:
Li, J. B., Willems, Y. E., Stok, F. M., Deković, M., Bartels, M., & Finkenauer, C. (2019). Parenting and self-control across early to late adolescence: A three-level meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, accepted, doi: 10.1177/1745691619863046
What the study is about? We synthesized the overall associations between parenting (positive parenting, negative parenting, and parent-child relationship) and self-control in adolescents aged 10 to 22 years. We also examined a number of theoretical and methodological factors that may potentially moderate the relationships.
Originality: Although several meta-analyses have summarized the overall effect of parenting on self-control in children, scant research has investigated this topic focusing on adolescents, a unique population featured with drastic changes in relationships with parents and increased impulsive and risk behavior. Moreover, no prior meta-analysis has ever examined the influence of child’s self-control on parents’ subsequent parenting. Our study is among the first to provide early knowledge about these gaps.
Rigor: The study was set up following the PRISMA guideline and pre-registered to facilitate open science. Published articles were searched from four electronic databases (i.e., PsycINFO, ERIC, PubMed, & Web of Science). A number of inclusion and exclusion criteria were established to strictly screen eligible studies. Based on a comprehensive coding scheme, two researchers coded the articles independently with high inter-rater reliability. Three-level random effect models, an innovative approach to handle dependency issue, were used to analyze the data. Variance at the sample, within-study, and between-study levels were decomposed. Moderators were first tested individually and then significant moderators were analyzed in a multiple-moderator regression model to control for multicollinearity. Publication bias issue was also addressed. The large number of effect size (total effect sizes = 1540) and sample size (> 160,000) ensured the statistical power.
Significance: We found that parenting is related to adolescent self-control both concurrently (r = .204, p < .001) and longitudinally (r = .157, p < .001). Beyond this, adolescent self-control also affects parents’ subsequent parenting (r = .155, p < .001). For specific dimensions, a warm and close parent-child relationship has the largest influence on self-control and vice versa. These findings are largely invariant across cultures (individualism vs. collectivism), ethnicities, age of adolescents, and parent and adolescent gender, but were moderated by a few methodological factors (e.g., research design, report informants, and consistence of report informant). Theoretically, this study confirms that parenting still plays a significant, yet modest, role in self-control across early to late adolescence. It also emphasizes the importance to consider both parent and child effects in understanding the spiral development of adolescent self-control. Practically, the findings suggest that among other parenting dimensions, establishing a warm and close parent-child relationship appears all the more crucial in nurturing adolescent self-control.
Want to know more? Here is the link of our paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691619863046