The Impact of Academic Achievement and Parental Practices on Depressive Symptom Trajectories Among Chinese Adolescents

Xingna Qin,Ping Ren,Tessa Kaufman,Yunyun Zhang,Lydia Laninga-Wijnen,René Veenstra

doi:10.1007/s10802-021-00826-9

Abstract

Though depressive symptoms tend to increase in early adolescence, the trajectories of these symptoms may vary strongly. This longitudinal study investigated the extent to which the distinct developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms were predicted by adolescents' academic achievement and perceived parental practices in a sample of Chinese young adolescents (N = 2,576). The results showed four trajectory profiles of depressive symptoms: low-stable (75%), low-increasing (11%), high-stable (9%), and high-decreasing (5%). Adolescents with high academic achievement were more likely to be classified into the low-stable, low-increasing, and high-decreasing profiles than into the high-stable depressive symptom profile. Moreover, students who perceived greater parental autonomy support were more likely to be in the low-stable and low-increasing profiles than the high-stable profile, whereas adolescents perceiving more parental psychological control had higher odds of being in the low-increasing rather than the low-stable profile. Parental educational involvement was unrelated to students' depressive symptom trajectories. In sum, Chinese adolescents with higher academic achievement and who perceived more parental autonomy support, and less psychological control, were at lower risk of experiencing depressive symptoms.

Highlights

The prevalence of depressive symptoms increases from early adolescence onwards (Duchesne & Ratelle, 2014; Mezulis et al, 2014; Yaroslavsky et al, 2013)
The three-step Growth Mixture Modelling (GMM) procedure considers the uncertainty associated with group membership when this is used as the dependent variable (Asparouhov & Muth, 2018). It adds the predictors of group membership simultaneously, which incorporates within-group variation as a random effect (Muthén, 2004). In this multinomial logistic regression model, we examined the role of academic achievement and parental practices in depressive symptom trajectories, taking gender, age, parents’ highest education, subjective Socioeconomic Status (SES), and urban/rural schools into account
We examined the interactive effects of academic achievement and parenting practices with the gender on depressive symptom trajectories

Summary

Introduction

The prevalence of depressive symptoms increases from early adolescence onwards (Duchesne & Ratelle, 2014; Mezulis et al, 2014; Yaroslavsky et al, 2013). Various studies in Western countries found both low academic achievement (e.g., Huang, 2015) and parental control (e.g., Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011) to affect adolescents’ depressive symptoms. The weight that is put on achievement may have important implications for how it is related to youths’ well-being and psychosocial functioning and, depressive symptom trajectories Parental practices, such as controlling or autonomy-restrictive practices, may be more normative in China than in Western contexts and, be viewed as appropriate by Chinese adolescents (Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011). Our study aimed to clarify how Chinese adolescents’ academic achievement and their perceptions of parental practices (autonomy support, psychological control, and educational involvement) shape trajectories of depressive symptoms after the transition to middle school. Trajectories characterized by moderate, increasing or decreasing symptoms were considered risk subgroups in prior work (though not as severe as the high-stable group), given their association with poor psychiatric and psychosocial outcomes in later life (Musliner et al, 2016; Yaroslavsky et al, 2013)

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Conclusion