Live Poster Session: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/3695502693
Abstract: The topic of parenting styles, and specifically strictness, has been discussed in countless parenting manuals. It has been a critical aspect of any new parent’s journey. If you raise your child too strictly, you may risk having a child who resents you and thus acts out. Too relaxed, and they might not learn discipline and respect. It is an inherently difficult balance. Add in the potential mental health effects on the child, and the question gets all the more difficult to answer. The aim of this project is to discover how parenting styles may affect the mental health of children. More specifically, this project focuses on parenting strictness in adolescence and how it may affect those adolescents into adulthood. After combining answers to survey questions on parenting styles in order to create a variable for parent strictness, and combining answers on mental health in order to create a variable for depression, statistical tests were run. These showed that there was a significant relationship between parenting strictness and depression. In many studies on this subject, results are grouped by sex. Therefore, the variable of sex was introduced, in order to observe whether it might act as a moderating or confounding variable. In this study, it was found that sex did not act as a moderating or confounding variable. According to the results of this project, parents should aim to be less strict with their children, in order to alleviate potential detrimental effects on their mental health.
Gheis-Presentation-PDF