The Relationship Of Decision-making Autonomy, Parent-child Cohesion, And Individual Subjective Well-being

Subjective well-being means that individuals make an overall evaluation of their life quality according to the standards set by themselves, which includes cognitive judgment(life satisfaction) and emotional experience(positive emotion and negative emotion)(Diener, 1999). As one of the important indicators of mental health status, subjective well-being plays great significance in the healthy development of adolescents. Decision-making autonomy indicates that individuals decide their behavior and tend to make decision by themselves rather than consulting with their parents, which reflected individual independent demands. Parent-child cohesion refers to the intimate emotional connection between parents and children, which reflected the relation demands. Previous studies have indicated that decision-making autonomy and parent-child cohesion can both significantly positively predict the subjective well-being of adolescents(Qin, Pomerantz, & Wang, 2009; Barber & Schluterman, 2008). The healthy psychological development for adolescents means the dynamic balance between independent demand and relation demand. For left-behind children in rural areas, their parents’ staying out for a long time may destroy the existing balance. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss about the common function of decision-making autonomy and parent-child cohesion on the subjective well-being of left-behind children by taking the living-with-parents children as control group.We applied the psychological measurement method, assessed 161 left-behind children and 213 non-left-behind children with a self-report scale of decision-making autonomy, parent-child cohesion, and subjective well-being. The present study was to investigate the characteristics of children’s decision-making autonomy, parent-child cohesion and subjective well-being, examine the direct prediction of decision-making autonomy, parent-child cohesion to children’s subjective well-being, and reveale the moderating role of parent-child cohesion in the relationship between children’s decision-making autonomy and subjective well-being and the possible gender differences between the variables. Conclusions are as follows:1. Left-behind children’s subjective well-being was significantly lower than non-left-behind children.2. Male adolescents’ father-child cohesion was significantly higher than female adolescents, and there were no significant left-behind category difference on mother-child cohesion.3. For both left-behind children and non-left-behind children, parent-child cohesion could positively predict children’s subjective well-being; decision-making autonomy could positively predict children’s life satisfaction, could not predict children’ s positive/negative emotion.4. For the non-left-behind children, decision-making autonomy could positively predict males’ positive emotion and life satisfaction, but the association was not significant for females.5. For the non-left-behind children, mother-child cohesion could negatively predict famales’ negative emotion, but the association was not significant for males.6. For the non-left-behind children, at the lower level of mother-child cohesion, decision-making autonomy could positively predict childrens’ life satisfaction, but the association was not significant at the higher level of mother-child cohesion.