Perceived Parental Rearing Practices, Supportive School Environment, and Self-Reported Emotional and Behavioral Problems among Lithuanian Secondary School Students

Abstract

Previous research rarely addressed parental rearing practices, perceived safety at school, teachers’ support and school climate in the same study. Most often those two contexts-home environment and school context-are analyzed separately. Several authors have advocated the need for incorporating those two contexts in the study of emotional and behavioral problems (Suldo et al., 2012). Thus, the main purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between the perceived parental practices (parents’ reactions to adolescents’ behavior, i.e., guilt induction and emotional warmth) and supportive school environment (school attachment, school climate, perceived teacher support, and feelings of safety at school) with adolescents’ emotional and behavioral problems. The data used is from an ongoing longitudinal Positive Youth Development study (POSIDEV) that examines the mechanisms and processes through which young people develop their competences. The sample comprised 2625 Lithuanian students (1146 boys and 1479 girls, age 14-20 (M = 16.69; SD = 1.17)) from the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades of 8 upper secondary schools. The results showed that parents’ emotional warmth was negatively, and psychological control was positively related to students’ depressive symptoms and delinquent behavior. Furthermore, perceived teacher support, feelings of safety at school were negatively associated with adolescents’ depressive symptoms and delinquent behavior, when students’ perceptions of negative school climate were positively associated with adolescents’ depressive symptoms and delinquent behavior. After entering school context variables in the regression, demographic characteristics and mother’s guilt induction practice remained significant, but mother’s emotional warmth was no longer significant. This suggests the possibility that school context acts as a mediator between emotional warmth by mother and delinquent behavior. This finding has important practical implications in terms of shedding some insight on how multiple systems might be interlinked in influencing wellbeing in adolescents and confirms the importance of intervening at the double platform of both the family and the school system.