Adolescents are more likely to have trouble managing their emotions when mothers and fathers are overly protective, according to new research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. This difficulty in handling emotions seems to be a key link between overprotective parenting and heightened social anxiety in teenagers.
Social anxiety is a serious problem that affects many adolescents and can lead to a number of issues such as depression, substance abuse, and dropping out of school early. Previous studies have shown that overprotective parenting can contribute to social anxiety, but it’s not clear why this is the case. The researchers suspected that how children and adolescents manage their emotions might play a role.
“My main field of interest is parenting and what parental factors contribute to development and well-being of their offspring,” said study author Louise Mathijs, a PhD researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels.
“Therefore, we wanted to see whether overprotective parenting practices, which is a topic that has received increasing attention, has an impact on their adolescent’s well-being, and whether these adolescents can adopt some emotion regulation strategies to mitigate these possibly detrimental effects.”
To conduct the study, the researchers used a sample of 278 adolescents from Switzerland who were in their last year of mandatory secondary schooling. They asked the students to fill out questionnaires about their level of social anxiety, their perception of their parents as overprotective, and their strategies for managing emotions. They looked at perceptions of both mothers and fathers separately.
The researchers specifically focused on three emotion regulation strategies: suppression (avoiding or hiding feelings), dysregulation (not being able to control or manage feelings), and integration (understanding and using feelings in a healthy way).
The researchers then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between these variables. They wanted to see if emotion regulation could explain the relationship between overprotective parenting and social anxiety, meaning that overprotective parenting might lead to poor emotion management, which in turn leads to social anxiety.
The results showed that adolescents who perceived their parents as more overprotective were more likely to report higher levels of social anxiety. The researchers also found that overprotective parenting was associated with more emotional dysregulation and suppression, which were both linked to higher levels of social anxiety. However, emotional integration was not found to be significant in this relationship.
“Overall, this study showed us that adolescents experienced more social anxiety if they perceived their parents to be overprotective. These findings suggest that it might be helpful for clinicians and practitioners to include parents when giving therapy to adolescents. That is because parents’ behaviors, such as their overprotective and emotion socialization behaviors, play a role in their offspring’s emotion regulation strategies.”
Interestingly, perceived maternal overprotection was associated with more emotional suppression. In other words, the participants tended to hide or suppress their emotions more often when they perceived their mother as too protective. But this was not the case for perceived paternal overprotection.
“We were surprised to find that emotional suppression (a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy) in adolescents was only related to maternal overprotection, and not to paternal overprotection. This may show that there is a dynamic of gender-typed emotion socialization, but further research is necessary to test this. Furthermore, it would be interesting to include both parents’ and adolescents’ perspectives when addressing the impact of overprotective parenting.”
The study, “Overprotective parenting and social anxiety in adolescents: The role of emotion regulation“, was authored by Louise Mathijs, Bénédicte Mouton, Grégoire Zimmermann, and Stijn Van Petegem.
