The Relationship Between Parental Control And Juvenile Future Planning: The Mediating Role Of Behavioral Autonomy

The old people like to recall the past, and the young would like to discuss future. Future orientation has been one of the focuses on the adolescents in our research; and mentioned the future orientation, we would have to come down to the future planning, which is the most important stage in future orientation. However, the impact of family is of great importance to someone, Previous research on the future planning had investigated from parenting type, and found that parental strictness/supervision can positively predict adolescents’future education planning. However, parental control include psychological control and behavior control from reading previous literatures, Therefore, According to the frameworks of cognitive psychology and action theory, this research will based on the view of parental control to study the relationship between it and the future planning, and make a further discussion on whether behavioral autonomy play a role.This paper has revised the behavioral autonomy scale firstly, and investigated again after the first investigation, finally, after delete two items, we got the behavioral autonomy scale with better fitting degree, which is all beyond 0.85. Then, we adopt cluster sampling method, investigated among the early to middle teenagers. This sample of 436 Chinese adolescents from two junior high schools and two senior high schools in Xi’an city, Shaanxi province were employed to complete the questionnaires. The self-reported questionnaires include Future Orientation Questionnaire, which is revised by Nurmi and Zhang Lingling are used to collect the data of the future planning(education and occupation), Parental Control Scale, revised by Eva Pomerantz and Wang Qian are used to measure the parental control, and Behavior Autonomy Scale, revised by our study 1. In our study, not only explore base characteristics of the parental control and future planning of teenagers at different stages, but also further studied the prediction effect of parental control on future planning, and the intermediary effect of behavioral autonomy between parental control and future planning. The following conclusions are obtained:1. Parental control have their unique prediction, i.e. parental psychological control can negatively predict the adolescents’ future planning; parental behavioral control can positively predict adolescents’ future planning.2. Behavioral autonomy plays part of the intermediary role between parental psychological control and education exploration, investment and career investment; behavioral autonomy plays part of the intermediary role between parental behavioral control and education exploration, investment and career exploration.