Parental psychological control and emotional well-being among emerging adults: The moderating role of parent-oriented self-construals

Abstract

It has been well documented that parental psychological control is detrimental to child and adolescent development. Yet, when entering emerging adulthood, the centrality of relationships with parents in youth’s lives may differ across individuals as well as cultures, making both cross- and within-cultural variations in the implications of parental psychological control for emerging adults’ emotional well-being worth exploration. Therefore, this research examined the relations from parental psychological control to youth’s emotional well-being among emerging adults from two cultures, and the moderating role of youth’s parent-oriented interdependent self-construals (i.e., the extent to which youth view their relationships with parents as self-defining) in these relations within each culture. A cross-cultural study was conducted among European American and Hong Kong Chinese college students in the United States and China, respectively (N = 276; 68.1% females; mean age = 20.39 years, SD = 1.33). It was found that youth’s perceived parental psychological control related to their dampened emotional well-being to a similar extent in both cultures. Moreover, these relations were moderated by youth’s parent-oriented self-construals similarly in both cultures, such that the negative associations between youth’s perceived parental psychological control and their emotional well-being were significant only among youth with high (vs low) levels of parent-oriented self-construals. The findings demonstrate the negative implications of parental psychological control for youth’s emotional well-being during emerging adulthood, and suggest that youth’s parent-oriented self-construals may amplify such implications.