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Teenagers raised by parents who rely on strict, punitive discipline with little warmth tend to hold more enduring beliefs that justify rule-breaking and aggression, and may later experience rises in anxiety and depression above their own typical levels. The findings, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, suggest that harsh, unyielding parenting relates to adolescent attitudes and emotional health through different pathways depending on whether researchers compare separate families or track changes within the same teenager over time.
Authoritarian parenting is a child-rearing style defined by rigid rules, high control, verbal hostility, and punishments delivered without explanation, combined with very little warmth. Prior research has linked this punitive approach to both internalizing problems, which are inward-focused emotional struggles like anxiety and depression, and externalizing problems, which involve outward disruptive behaviors such as aggression and delinquency.
Most studies of disruptive youth development have focused on outward delinquent actions rather than the mindset that precedes them. This mental foundation, known as antisocial thinking, consists of beliefs, attitudes, and values that approve of breaking rules, defying authority, and using aggression during peer conflicts. According to social information processing theory, these background beliefs shape how young people interpret social situations, making them more likely to assume others have hostile intentions and respond aggressively.
Endorsement of antisocial thinking typically increases from late childhood into middle adolescence, when personal beliefs become more ingrained and resistant to change. To examine how these attitudes develop alongside emotional distress, Wusirige, a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Syracuse University, and co-authors Bo Jian and Gabriel J. Merrin drew on emotion regulation and social-cognitive frameworks. In this view, a cold, hostile home environment may create chronic stress that wears down a teenager’s ability to manage difficult feelings, while threats and unexplained punishments may teach youth to view authority as arbitrary and coercion as acceptable.
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“Much of the work on antisocial behavior focuses on identifying and addressing behavior that has already emerged,” Wusirige told PsyPost. “That work is essential, but once harmful behavior occurs, consequences for adolescents and others may already have followed. We wanted to look further upstream at antisocial thinking – the beliefs and attitudes that can make aggression or rule-breaking seem acceptable. Understanding these cognitive precursors may create opportunities for prevention while adolescents develop their values and social judgments.”
“Given the well-established role of parenting in child and adolescent development, we wanted to examine whether authoritarian parenting was associated with antisocial thinking,” Wusirige added. “We were also interested in how these thinking patterns relate to adolescents’ emotional lives: do beliefs that justify aggression or rule-breaking occur alongside depression and anxiety, and might difficulties in one area be associated with later difficulties in another?”
Anxiety, depression, and antisocial tendencies frequently appear together in the same teenagers across racial and ethnic groups. Developmental cascade theory suggests that difficulties in one domain may spill over and worsen problems in another over time, such as emotional distress fueling hostile attitudes toward peers. An alternative possibility is that these problems simply reflect a shared, stable underlying vulnerability rather than triggering one another over short periods.
Testing these ideas requires separating stable differences between teenagers from temporary shifts within an individual teenager over time. A between-person comparison asks whether teenagers from stricter families generally have higher average levels of depression or antisocial thinking than peers from less strict families, whereas a within-person analysis asks whether an individual teenager experiences a rise or dip relative to their own personal baseline.
Recent work shows how these levels can diverge: a 2026 longitudinal study of Chinese middle schoolers found that once stable differences between students were separated out, parent-child attachment was not linked to short-term within-person changes in empathy or helpful behavior.
The Syracuse University researchers also examined whether these patterns differ for boys and girls. Teenage girls generally report higher levels of anxiety and depression, whereas boys often display more outward antisocial behavior, and past studies have offered mixed findings on whether strict parenting relates to youth adjustment differently by gender.
The authors analyzed data from 491 adolescents and their parents across the United States who participated in a longitudinal project on bias-based harassment through the National Opinion Research Center’s AmeriSpeak Panel, a survey panel recruited through random sampling to reflect U.S. households. Families completed four survey waves spaced roughly six months apart between November 2021 and the summer of 2023. The analytic sample was restricted to cisgender, heterosexual teenagers whose responding guardian was their biological mother or father, as sexual and gender minority youth often experience distinct family dynamics.
At the first wave, the teenagers had an average age of about 15.3 years, and 51.5 percent were female. Nearly half of the youth were non-Hispanic White, alongside sizable shares of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black adolescents. Mothers made up 71.3 percent of the responding parents, and the families spanned a wide range of household incomes, from under $30,000 to $100,000 or more.
At Wave 1, all 491 parents completed a 12-item questionnaire rating how often they used authoritarian parenting practices on a 0-to-4 scale from never to always, including items on physical punishment, yelling when the child misbehaves, and using threats without explanation. Each family had one responding parent, and because mothers’ and fathers’ average scores did not differ, the researchers analyzed their reports together.
Teenagers reported on their own anxiety, depression, and antisocial thinking across the second, third, and fourth waves, with 413 participating at Wave 2, 377 at Wave 3, and 364 at Wave 4. Modeling youth outcomes from Waves 2 through 4 ensured that the initial parenting survey preceded all outcomes. Teenagers rated how often over the past two weeks they experienced seven symptoms of generalized anxiety, such as feeling nervous or on edge, and eight symptoms of depression, such as having little interest in activities.
To measure antisocial thinking, teenagers responded to 20 statements covering rule noncompliance and peer conflict, rating their agreement with items such as “It’s no big deal to skip a few classes” and “Some kids deserve to be picked on.” Across this community sample, average levels of harsh parenting and youth difficulties were generally low: the mean authoritarian parenting score was 0.61 on the 0-to-4 scale, between “never” and “rarely,” and average anxiety, depression, and antisocial thinking scores were similarly low.
The researchers used a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to separate stable between-person averages from wave-to-wave within-person fluctuations, while adjusting for race and ethnicity, parental education, parental cohabitation, and household income.
At the between-person level, higher authoritarian parenting at baseline was associated with modestly higher stable levels of antisocial thinking across the study. Teenagers whose parents relied more heavily on harsh, unreasoned discipline tended to consistently endorse stronger beliefs justifying rule-breaking and peer aggression than peers with less authoritarian parents. By contrast, between-person associations between authoritarian parenting and average levels of anxiety or depression were not statistically significant.
At the within-person level, baseline authoritarian parenting was not linked to wave-to-wave shifts in antisocial thinking, nor was it associated with changes in anxiety or depression at the second or third waves. At the fourth wave, roughly 18 months after the initial parenting survey, earlier authoritarian parenting was positively associated with within-person increases in both anxiety and depression, indicating a modest rise above each teenager’s own typical level of distress. This association appeared only at the final wave, and the link with depression sat right at the threshold for statistical significance.
In the authors’ reading, the between-person link with antisocial thinking suggests that when rules are enforced through threats rather than explanation, teenagers may not internalize the moral rationale behind social norms, instead forming stable beliefs that authority is arbitrary and coercion is legitimate. To explain the delayed within-person rise in anxiety and depression at Wave 4, the researchers offer two possibilities: chronic stress from parental hostility may gradually drain emotional coping resources until symptoms surface once a threshold is surpassed, or the timing of the survey waves may have shaped when the link became visible, so a different spacing between surveys might have detected it earlier or later.
“One takeaway is that the absence of immediate difficulties does not necessarily mean there will be no difficulties later,” Wusirige explained. “For parents, these findings highlight the value of consistently using warmth, explanation, and constructive guidance, even when a teenager seems to be doing well, rather than waiting for visible problems to emerge,” Wusirige said.
Across the three youth outcomes, teenagers’ stable between-person levels of anxiety, depression, and antisocial thinking were all positively correlated with one another. Teenagers who generally experienced higher average anxiety and depression also tended to hold more antisocial attitudes. At the within-person level, however, all cross-lagged links among the three outcomes were not statistically significant, meaning the analysis did not detect evidence that a temporary rise in one problem predicted a later rise in another.
Rather than supporting short-term developmental cascades across six-month intervals, the authors suggest that the co-occurrence of anxiety, depression, and antisocial thinking may reflect shared, stable trait-level vulnerabilities, such as temperament. The authors also note that the lack of within-person links could partly reflect the model itself, which removes stable differences first and may leave fluctuations too small to reveal such links.
When the researchers compared models for boys and girls, differences across gender were not statistically significant for any pathway, suggesting the associations may operate similarly for boys and girls, though more subtle gender differences could still emerge in specific contexts or developmental stages.
These findings align with an earlier study of mothers and adolescents, which similarly linked strict, punitive parenting to adolescent anxiety and depression symptoms. That earlier work examined specific acts of harsh maternal discipline and observed heightened vulnerability among daughters, whereas the new study assessed overall authoritarian parenting style and did not detect gender differences.
As with all research, there are some caveats to keep in mind. “One important caveat is that these findings show associations, not causation,” Wusirige noted. “Although we followed adolescents over time, a longitudinal design alone cannot establish that only authoritarian parenting caused the patterns we observed.”
Because authoritarian parenting was assessed only once at baseline, the between-person link with antisocial thinking represents an association between stable characteristics rather than evidence that parenting caused those attitudes. Parent-child dynamics can work in both directions, and teenagers with preexisting difficulties may elicit stricter reactions from parents. Because parenting was not measured at later waves, the model also could not test whether shifts in parenting preceded within-person rises in anxiety and depression, or whether unmeasured time-varying influences played a role.
In addition, the researchers analyzed maternal and paternal parenting scores together because far more mothers than fathers participated, which may obscure distinct ways that mothers and fathers relate to adolescent adjustment. “Future research should include more fathers, as well as other caregivers, and assess both parents’ parenting to better understand their potentially distinct and combined associations with adolescent adjustment,” Wusirige said.
The sample was also limited to cisgender, heterosexual teenagers in the United States whose participating parent was a biological parent, so the findings may not generalize to sexual and gender minority youth, nonbiological caregivers, or other cultural contexts. Future studies could also examine whether parenting programs that promote reasoning-based discipline help prevent entrenched antisocial attitudes and later emotional distress.
“It is also important to distinguish antisocial thinking from actual behavior,” Wusirige emphasized. “Endorsing beliefs that justify aggression or rule-breaking does not mean that an adolescent will necessarily act on them. Our interest in these thinking patterns is about identifying opportunities for earlier prevention, rather than labeling adolescents or treating their futures as predetermined.”
The study, “Longitudinal associations between authoritarian parenting and adolescent antisocial thinking, depression, and anxiety: Between- and within-person effects,” was authored by Wusirige, Bo Jian, and Gabriel J. Merrin.
