Longitudinal Association between Maternal Autonomy Support and Controlling Parenting and Adolescents' Depressive Symptoms

Abstract

Most studies on autonomy support and controlling parenting rely on children's perceptions, despite the limitations of this approach. This study investigated congruency between autonomy support and controlling parenting reported by mothers and adolescents and their association with adolescents' depressive symptoms via basic psychological needs satisfaction. Participants included 408 Japanese mother-adolescent (M_age = 13.73, SD = 0.90, 52% female) pairs who completed a questionnaire at two time points four months apart. Results demonstrated low to moderate levels of mother-adolescent agreement. Cross-lagged regression models revealed that mothers' reported autonomy support positively predicted adolescents' basic psychological needs satisfactions, which was negatively associated with depressive symptoms. The independent roles of parenting reported by mothers and adolescents for adolescents' well-being were discussed.

Keywords: Adolescents; Autonomy support; Basic psychological needs satisfaction; Controlling parenting; Depressive symptoms; Self-determination theory.

Fig. 1

The model explored in the present study. Under the stationarity assumption, for example, if paths a and b are significant, the paths would provide the estimate of the mediational effect of the relation between A and C by B (Cole & Maxwell, ; for application, see Ohtani et al., 2020). Dotted lines indicate that the relations are hypothesized to be negative

Fig. 2

Standardized coefficients from regression models. Non-significant paths (p ≥ 0.05) were omitted from the figure for brevity. Dotted lines indicate that the relations were negative