The Relation Between Internalizing Problems And Maternal Negative Parenting Behaviors During Early Adolescence:Moderating Role Of Sex And Socioeconomic Status

With the rapid changes in physiology, cognition and environment, internalizing problems have become an important maladaptation of early adolescents. In addition, although internalizing problems are covert, it would pose threats to individual's life. Parenting is a critical factor for adolescent's internalizing problems. Transactional model asserts that there is a continuous dynamic interplay between children's behavior and parental reactions to this behavior. However, there is no consistent findings of a bidirectional relation between adolescent's internalizing problems and parenting. Additionally, recent studies have increasingly emphasized that the associations between parenting and children's behaviors may vary across forms of psychological adjustment and parenting behaviors. Specifically, different parenting behaviors related to adolescents' psychological adjustment in specific ways. Besides, previous researches on the relationship between negative parenting and adolescents' adaption only focused on single aspect of adjustment problems, without considering other types problems. This study investigated the bidirectional relation between different negative parenting behaviors(monitoring, indulgence, harshness) and early adolescents' loneliness, depression, and tested whether the relation varies across different forms of psychological adjustment and parenting behaviors.Some factors may moderate the relationship between parenting and internalizing problems of adolescent. Findings of researches have suggested sex differences in internalizing problems. Additionally, boys are likely to experience higher levels of negative parenting than girls. Besides, boys' internalizing problems are more likely to attract parental attention. Therefore, sex may moderate the relation between negative parenting and internalizing problems. Moreover, studies have shown that negative parenting on the development of adolescent may vary across different cultural norms. If a form of negative parenting conforms to the cultural norm, the negative influences of this negative parenting would be discounted. Negative parenting even may be a protective factor for adolescent who lives in low socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status may moderate the relationship between negative parenting and internalizing problems. Thus, we investigated the moderation of sex and socioeconomic status among the bidirectional relation between negative parenting and adolescents' internalizing problems.The participants were 581(10 years of age / Grade 4) students who were followed twice with an interval of one year. Internalizing problems are collected by self-report. Mothers report the negative parenting behavior and socioeconomic status. The cross-lagged panel analyses were used to investigate the bidirectional relation between internalizing problems and maternal negative parenting. And we analyzed the moderate effect of the sex and socioeconomic status between the bidirectional relationship by using the hierarchical regression. The main findings were as followed:(1) For internalizing problems, loneliness showed a downward trend. Boys showed higher level of loneliness than girls at T1; the level of depression was relatively stable. No sex differences were found. The negative parenting behaviors(monitoring, indulgence, harshness) showed moderate stability.(2) Child effect was found in the bidirectional relation between loneliness and negative parenting. Specifically, loneliness predicted the negative parenting behaviors one year later.(3) The bidirectional relation between depression and negative parenting was not confirmed neither did child effect nor parent effect.(4) The moderating of sex was not significant. Socioeconomic status only moderated the influence of loneliness on monitoring.