Young Adults' Coping Strategies as Associated with Perceptions of Their Coping Socialization Experiences and Their Schemas about Their Parents

Research on the development of coping is still in its infancy and has received only limited empirical attention despite numerous calls for its investigation (Kliewer, Sandler, & Wolchik, 1994; Compas, 1998; Power, 2004). In response to the need for an organizing model, Kliewer et al. (1994) developed a model depicting parents’ socialization of children’s coping during childhood. Specifically, parents might socialize children’s repertoire of coping strategies through their own modeled behavior, explicit suggestions about how to cope, and the global environment that they provide. Because young adults show a marked increase in reports of everyday stress relative to younger children (Aldwin et al., 1996), it is especially important to examine factors that predict successful coping in this developmental period. Therefore, the current study examined the three potential pathways of coping development proposed by Kliewer and colleagues (1994) in a sample of young adults who, because of their better developed cognitive capacities and more finely-tuned emotion-related skills, may be more aware of parents' coping and more capable of integrating their observations into their own behaviors. Because theoretical advances call for understanding the role of children as active participants in their own socialization process (Scarr, 1992) and because Eisenberg and colleagues (1998) suggested that children are more open to parents’ socialization efforts when the parent-child relationship is positive, the current study examined young adults’ schemas about their parents as not only a direct predictor, but also a moderator of parents’ coping socialization behaviors and young adults’ coping strategies. Using regression analyses, the current study provides evidence that young adults’ perceptions of their parents’ coping behaviors and suggestions are predictive of young adults’ own self-reported coping behaviors. Further, gender was a significant moderator between perceptions of parents’ avoidance behaviors and suggestions and young adults’ avoidance coping. Contrary to prediction, young adults’ schemas about parents were not directly related to young adults’ coping behaviors. However, young adults’ schemas about their parents were significant moderators for a number of the relations between their perceptions of parents’ coping behaviors and suggestions and their own self-reported coping behaviors. The results from the current study provide the first evidence that young adults’ beliefs about their parents do matter for their own coping development.