The Role of Parental Acceptance⁻Rejection in Emotional Instability During Adolescence.

Santiago Mendo-Lázaro,María-Isabel Polo-Del-Río,Benito León-Del-Barco,Rocío Yuste-Tosina,Víctor-María López-Ramos

doi:10.3390/ijerph16071194

Santiago Mendo-Lázaro, María-Isabel Polo-Del-Río + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071194

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Abstract

The present study focuses on analyzing the relationship between the parental acceptance–rejection perceived by adolescents and emotional instability from the early stages of adolescence. Special attention will be paid to potential differences between mothers and fathers. A total of 1181 students, aged 11–17, took part in the study. We used the factor of emotional instability in the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ-NA) and an affect scale (EA-H) to measure parental acceptance–rejection. The analyses performed show a clear association between emotional instability with maternal/paternal criticism and rejection. Specifically, maternal criticism and rejection in early adolescence and paternal criticism and rejection in middle adolescence were associated with emotional instability, confirming the association between children’s and adolescents’ emotional adjustment and family dynamics. This study makes interesting contributions to understanding paternal and maternal rejection during the different stages of adolescence. These differences should be incorporated into the research on parental influence and its role in the development of personality among adolescents.

Highlights

Parental influence and its crucial role in child development is widely acknowledged.Understanding the individual differences in the relationships between parents and adolescents is key, because the quality of these relationships shapes the development of adolescents [1]
This research should answer questions like “Which parental behaviors may associate with which personality traits in adolescents?” In this regard, the present study focuses on analyzing the relationship between parental acceptance–rejection perceived by adolescents for emotional instability from the early stages of adolescence
They consisted of an instrument reliability analysis, a multifactor variance analysis, a linear regression analysis, and lastly, a classification model was created. This model was based on a chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) decision tree flowchart. This is not a study goal per se, in order to avoid potential confounding factors in the search for the main associations object of study here, we conducted multivariate comparisons of the median scores for emotional instability and for the EA-H factors according to gender, age, and the interaction between both variables (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Parental influence and its crucial role in child development is widely acknowledged.Understanding the individual differences in the relationships between parents and adolescents is key, because the quality of these relationships shapes the development of adolescents [1]. McCrae and Costa’s Big Five Model [8] is one of the most widely accepted paradigms for the study of personality, and it constitutes a valuable representation of the structure of personality in children and adolescents [9,10]. This model puts forward five dimensions, enabling the identification of adolescents in terms of social adjustment and adaptation [11]

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