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. 2018 Nov 24;15(12):2634.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph15122634.

Parenting Style and Reactive and Proactive Adolescent Violence: Evidence from Spain

David Moreno-Ruiz  1 , Estefanía Estévez  2 , Teresa I Jiménez  3 , Sergio Murgui  4
Affiliations

Parenting Style and Reactive and Proactive Adolescent Violence: Evidence from Spain

David Moreno-Ruiz et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between the parenting styles-authoritative, indulgent, authoritarian, and neglectful-and reactive and proactive school violence among peers. These analyses were also performed by sex and age groups. The sample consisted of 2399 Spanish adolescents (50.2% male), aged between 12 and 18 years, mean (M) = 14.69, standard deviation (SD) = 1.82. A multivariate analisys of variance (MANOVA, 4 × 2 × 2) was applied, considering parenting style, sex, and age group (12⁻14 and 15⁻18 years) as independent variables to analyze the possible effects of interaction. Reactive, proactive, and pure violence were the dependent variables. The results showed the main effects of parenting styles, sex, and age, as well as an interaction between sex, age, and parenting styles. The interpretation of the findings suggested that the authoritarian parenting style was related to greater engagement in proactive and reactive violent behaviors. In relation to the effect of the interaction between sex, age, and parenting styles, it was observed that adolescents from indulgent families, of both sexes and in any of the studied age groups, obtained lower scores in proactive violence. The discussion highlights the importance of affection and warmth for well-adjusted children's behavior.

Keywords: adolescence; parenting styles; proactive/reactive violence.

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Conflict of interest statement

This article is based on original research and has not, and will not, be submitted to any other journal for publication. All the authors confirm that the contents of the manuscript follow all required ethical norms applying to scientific publications, and do not have any conflicts of interest that might influence the research. In addition, all the authors contributed significantly to the manuscript and gave their consent to appear in it.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Means of proactive violence by parenting style, sex, and age.
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