Be(com)ing social: Daily-life social interactions and parental bonding

Parenting experiences are hypothesized to provide a lasting basis for adaptive socialization, but little is known about the relationship between parenting characteristics and daily-life social interactions. Adolescent and young adult twins and their siblings (N = 628) completed the Parental Bonding Instrument and a six-day Experience Sampling period to gather information on their daily-life social interactions. Higher overall parental bonding quality related to more positive social experiences in daily life, but not to different levels of social behaviors. Relative to maternal dimensions, paternal dimensions were uniquely predictive of better subjective social experiences. These findings demonstrate that specific aspects of parental bonding have unique effects upon how adolescents experience their social world, thereby making the idea of socialization through parenting relevant at the level of daily life.