The Relationship Of Parental Control And Adolescent Problem Behavior

Parental control can be divided into psychological control and behavioral control.Psychological control refers to parents’trying to control behaviors of the teenagers bycontrol their moods emotions, thoughts and parent-child relationships. Behavioralcontrol refers to parents’trying to control behaviors of the teenagers through thesupervisions, restrictions and rules. Many theories and the empirical researches haveshown that parental control have significant impacts on problem behaviors ofadolescents, especially psychological controls have more seriously negative effects onthe development of the adolescents.However, at present, the domestic studies on parental control and its influences arerelatively scarce. Given that adolescence is an important stage for mentaldevelopment, the impacts of this time for parental control on adolescents’problembehaviors are prominent of, therefore, this study examined the impacts of parentalcontrol on adolescent’problem behaviors on this stage. In addition, the previousresearch also found that parental control had a important role on the formation anddevelopment of the personality of the perfectionism. Therefore, this study examinedthe relationship of parental control and adolescent problem behaviors on the basis offurther investigated the whether the adolescents’perfectionism would mediate theeffect of parental control on adolescents’problem behaviors.560 students in grades 7-9 from a junior high school in Jinan participated in thisstudy. The revised Chinese parental control scales, which are revised by EvaPomerantz and Wang Qian are used to collect the data of the parental control. TheChinese Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale(CFMPS), which are revised byZiFei and ZhouXu, are used to measure the perfectionism of adolescents. Achenbachchildren Self Report edition behavior Scale (Youth Self-Report, YSR) are used tomeasure adolescents’problem behaviors. The main conclusions are as follows:1. Adolescents report lower levels of psychological control and moderate levels ofbehavior control. The level of psychological control for boys was higher than that forgirls, but the behavioral control for girls were more than the boy; There were nosignificant differences for parental control between different grades; Parental controland family socio-economic status was not significantly correlated.2. The gender difference between adolescent on maladaptive perfectionism was notsignificant, but it was significant in the adaptive perfectionism. The adaptiveperfectionism for girls is higher than that for boys; There were no significantdifferences for perfectionism between different grades. 3. Psychological control positively predicted adolescents’internalizing andexternalizing behaviors, psychological control had negative impacts on thedevelopment of adolescents; Behavioral control didn’t predict the problem behaviorof adolescents.4. The correlation between adolescent maladaptive perfectionism and problembehaviors was significantly positive, the correlation between adaptive perfectionismand externalizing problem behaviors was significantly negative. Parentalpsychological control positively correlated with maladaptive perfectionism, parentalbehavioral control positively correlated with maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism.5. Adolescent maladaptive perfectionism could partly mediate the effect ofpsychological control on adolescent internalizing and externalizing behaviorsrespectively. The mediating effect size was 0.16 and 0.12 respectively, and theproportion in the total effect was 54.07% and 45.83% respectively.