A new study suggests that teenagers whose parents have tight psychological control on them have a hard time developing close relationships later in life.
The study was led by University of Virginia Psychology Professor Joseph Allen and Dr. Barbara Oudekerk, a post-doctoral student and a statistician at the Department of Justice Statistics. The study published in the journal “Child Development,” was titled “The Cascading Development of Autonomy and Relatedness from Adolescence to Adulthood,” and followed a group of teenagers from the age 13 to 21.
The research group studied the youth’s relationship with their parents and found that when the parents used guilt, shame, withdrawing of love or cultivation of anxiety, which are all ways to assert psychological control, it set the adolescents on a path of badly functioning relationships as adults.
“Adolescents who have parents who do this, they learn that in close relationships it is bad to assert your opinion and you’ll hurt other people,” said Elenda Hessel, one of the doctoral candidates who worked in the research group conducting the study to the Cavalier Daily. “[The adolescents] think that this is what happens at home and so this is what must happen elsewhere.”
“As predicted, the researchers found that parental psychological control ultimately undermines the youth’s ability to properly express autonomy and relatedness when in disagreement with close friends and later on, romantic partners,” the article reads. “This shows the importance of the transitional period from early adolescence to late adulthood.”
