Perceived Discipline Consistency in Parent–Child Relationships During Emerging Adulthood

Abstract

Parenting is an adaptive process that plays a crucial role in children’s social and emotional development. According to the integrative model of parenting (Darling & Steinberg, 1993), parenting is a dynamic interaction involving many factors, including parent–child relationship quality and discipline consistency, through which children learn about rules, expectations, and emotional socialization. Although most research on parent–child relationships has been conducted with children and adolescents, research has suggested that parents continue to impact their emerging adult children, who are experiencing significant life changes in life. Thus, we examined the impact of parent–child relationship quality on emerging adults’ externalizing and internalizing problems in the context of discipline consistency and binary gender. Using a cross-sectional sample of 460 emerging adults, we found that when examined alongside perceived parental relationship quality, maternal, but not paternal, discipline consistency was associated with lower levels of externalizing and internalizing problems in daughters and sons. Notably, perceived maternal discipline consistency moderated the relation between perceived maternal relationship quality and externalizing problems. Specifically, perceived maternal discipline consistency might facilitate the positive benefits of high-quality maternal relationships. Results provide supporting evidence that discipline consistency could be an augmenting factor in healthy parenting relationships.