Correlates and Antecedents of Parental Psychological Control in Early Adolescence

SYNOPSIS Objective. This study tests family contextual experiences and mother and child attributes as correlates and antecedents of mothers' psychologically controlling behavior with their early adolescents. Design. During in-home interviews, 218 early adolescents and their mothers reported their perceptions of the mothers' psychological control. Mothers and adolescents also reported relevant personal attributes. Results. Correlations show the expected patterns of associations between the predictor sets and psychological control at ages 11 and 12. Cross-sectional regression analyses show that the age 11 predictor variables explained 14% of the variance in age 11 adolescent-reported psychological control. Child attributes were the only unique predictors of psychological control. In contrast, the predictors accounted for 15% of the variance in mother-reported psychological control with both contextual factors and mother attributes explaining unique variance in psychological control. Evidence of longitudinal associations was minimal. Conclusions. Results support mother attributes, child attributes, and family contextual experiences as unique correlates of psychological control.