The reciprocal relationships between parenting attitudes and emotional problems in adolescence: A longitudinal cross-lagged analysis

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the reciprocal relationship between parenting attitudes (positive and negative) and adolescent emotional problems as indicated by aggression, social withdrawal, and depression.Methods: This study analyzed longitudinal data from 2,325 parents and their children from the Korea Children and Youth Panel Survey 2018 at three time points over a three-year period (the first to third grade of middle school). Autoregressive cross-lagged modeling was conducted using AMOS 26.0.Results: The results indicated that both parenting attitudes and adolescents’ emotional problems were relatively stable over time. In other words, the parenting attitude at a previous point affects the parenting attitude at a later point, and the emotional problem at the previous point continues to affect the emotional problem at the later point. There were no significant cross-lagged effects from both positive and negative parenting attitudes to adolescents’ emotional problems. In contrast, adolescents’ emotional problems at previous time points positively predicted negative parenting attitudes at later time points. In other words, if there were many emotional problems of aggression, social withdrawal, and depression in adolescents at a previous time, negative parenting attitudes such as rejection, force, and inconsistency at a later time increased.Conclusion: This study can reflect the characteristics of the development of independence in adolescence. Parents should deal with their children’s emotional problems based on their understanding of the developmental characteristics of adolescence, and this study provides a strategy for parents to establish appropriate parenting attitudes for adolescents with emotional problems.