The relationship between perceived parenting styles and resilience during adolescence

Objective - The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between perceived parenting styles and resilience in adolescence. Method - The respondents were a sample of 360 English speaking subjects, with a mean age of 17.6 years. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to investigate this relationship. The criterion variables included sense of coherence and problem-focused, emotion-focused and dysfunctional coping strategies. The predictor variables included six scales. Results - Authoritative parenting provided the most significant contribution to the explanation of the variance in resilience for black and white adolescents, and both genders. Surprisingly, the findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between fathers' authoritarian styles and emotion-focused coping strategies in white adolescent learners. In contrast, other researchers found that authoritarian and harsh parental styles are closely related to psychological disturbance. Conclusions - The identified relationships between the criterion and predictor variables found in this study for both black and white adolescents of both genders have distinct and far-reaching implications for envisaged interventions. A future study might also investigate the present study qualitatively. Further research will be necessary to enhance and develop appropriate parenting styles that facilitate resilience in adolescent children. Making use of more sophisticated methodologies, paying greater attention to the interaction between internal and external circumstances and refining theories to make specific predictions about how input variables influence components, should be considered in future.