Direct and Indirect Relations between Perceived Parental Acceptance, Perceptions of the Self, and Emotional Adjustment during Early Adolescence

The direct and indirect relations between perceived parental acceptance, perceptions of the self, and emotional adjustment were examined in a sample of 214 sixth‐and seventh‐grade students in the fall and the spring of the 1990–1991 academic year. These relations were examined separately by the gender of the adolescent and the parent. Results indicated that adolescent boys were better adjusted than adolescent girls. Boys reported lower levels of anxiety and depression and higher levels of perceived self‐worth, athletic competence, and satisfaction with physical appearance than did girls. In addition, findings from structural equation modeling analyses indicated that the direct paths between perceived parental acceptance and emotional adjustment fit better than models including the indirect paths between perceived parental acceptance, self‐competence, and emotional adjustment primarily because self‐competence wasfound to be unrelated to emotional adjustment. Nonetheless, parental acceptance was found to be consistently related to self‐competence, especiallyfor girls.