THE PERCEIVED PARENTING STYLE AS A PREDICTOR OF THE GENERAL FEMALE COMMUNICATION STYLE

Abstract

Communication is of great importance for all facets of human life. Its role in parenting is manifested in the transfer of values, beliefs, norms, and new skills from parents to the younger generation. As documented in the scientific literature, maternal parenting style has a greater impact on a child’s development than paternal one (Baumrind, 1991; Patock-Peckham, et al., 2006; Barton, 2012). Therefore, understanding the general communication style of women and its relations to the perceived parenting style of their mothers and fathers will allow us to study family dynamics from a more holistic perspective. There is no consensus in the scientific community about the classification of communication and its connection to the perceived parenting styles among females. We aimed to study the interaction between perceived parenting style and general female communication style. To this end, we performed quantitative research using the Communication Style Inventory (Vries, 2011) and the Experiences in Close Relationships – Relationship Structures Questionnaire ECR-RS (Fraley et al., 2011) adapted for the Bulgarian cultural context by Totkova (2014). In our research took part 281 Bulgarian adult females. We have found that both the perceived mother’s authoritarian and perceived father’s permissive parenting styles are strong predictors of the general communication style of adult females. Furthermore, all four perceived parenting styles exhibited a strong correlation with certain communication styles. In conclusion, the perceived paternal parenting style is just as strong a predictor of general female communication style as the maternal one.