How Parenting Styles Influence Adults’ Social Anxiety

Abstract

Causes of social anxiety come from a variety of sources, and one of the earliest causes is parenting styles. Children’s consistent development of social anxiety may result from the use of different parenting styles by parents and social anxiety can persist into adulthood and even affect a person's whole life. In this paper, the author uses a questionnaire consisting of the s-EMBU-C scale and the Shyness Scale to examine the interaction between parenting styles and social anxiety in adults. A total of 420 effective data were collected in this study, after analysis, it was found that the age group of the respondents in this survey was still concentrated in their 20s overall, although some were individually higher. In the s-EMBU-C, no significant difference was found between the scores of the paternal factors and the maternal factors in the same dimension. In the Shyness Scale, more respondents selected low-scoring items, but the number of extremely high scores was high, so the overall scores were moderately high. Age was significantly associated with all factors in both s-EMBU-C and Shyness Scale. s-EMBU-C was significantly correlated with several factors in Shyness Scales. No clear regression prediction was found for the present survey data after regression prediction by SPSS. Although the findings of this study show a correlation between Parenting Styles and adult social anxiety, the author concludes that there are many other factors may influence adult social anxiety. Parenting Styles only partially affect adults’ social anxiety levels.