Exploring the Effect of Parental Styles on Social Skills: The Mediating Role of Affects

Abstract

Parental educational styles have a significant effect in personal development. These styles (authoritative, democratic, permissive and neglectful) can be related to affects and social skills at the individual level. The study presented here, which comprised 456 participants (151 men; 33.11%), with an average age of 22.01 years (s.d. = 2.80), aimed to analyse the relationship between parental styles, affects and social skills, as well as the role played by affects in the relationship between parental style and social skills. The results suggest that the constructs under study are closely related. The most common parental style is democratic. By gender, permissive styles were more often applied to women and authoritative styles to men. No significant gender differences were found in the application of democratic and neglectful parental styles. In terms of emotional support, women were found to have higher negative affect scores and men higher emotional support scores. People with parents that use democratic and permissive styles scored higher in all variables related to affects and social skills, which challenges the notion that democratic styles are the best parental styles in terms of socialisation of children. The results of the affect and social skills scales were analysed in relation to parenting styles, indicating that children educated under a democratic parental regime tend to yield higher scores in terms of social skills than children educated under any other form of parental regime and medium scores in terms of affects. Finally, it was found that parenting styles have a direct influence on social skills, which tend to improve when affects play a mediating role between these two constructs. These results suggest that parenting styles are closely related to affects and social skills. In addition, they also suggest that affects play a mediating role in the relationship between parenting styles and social skills. Finally, owing to the impact that parenting styles have on affects and social skills, more research is needed to address this issue.

The impact of parenting styles on undergraduate students’ emotion regulation: The mediating role of academic-social student-faculty interaction

“…As for emotion regulation, boys are significantly more capable of regulating their emotions than girls. This is similar to the findings of Salavera et al (2022) study. There are some differences in the choice of cognitive emotion regulation strategies between males and females.…”

“…Meanwhile, when parents encourage their children to be independent and meet the need for autonomy, children 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.972006 are more inclined to think proactively and master strategies to cope with difficult situations (Marcone et al, 2020). This leads to a greater sense of self-efficacy, which in turn leads to a better emotion regulation in the face of complex tasks (Salavera et al, 2022). Parents do not blame their children even when they fail and do not break the family atmosphere where children are supported and respected (Moè et al, 2020).…”

The relationship between basic psychological needs and emotional and behavioral problems in middle school students

“…Navarro et al (2019) In contrast, children of parents who exercise positive parenting practices are less likely to experience internalizing and externalizing problems and more likely to engage in prosocial behavior (Sangawi et al, 2018). Research shows that negative parenting practices make children more likely to develop emotional and behavioral problems (Fong et al, 2022;Salavera et al, 2022). Authoritative parents are nurturing, responsive and supportive parents set clear expectations and boundaries for their children and ensure they understand why they are in place.…”

Relationship between family-related factors and functional constipation among Chinese preschoolers: a case–control study

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