Reciprocal relationships among parental psychological control, emotion regulation ability, and subjective well-being of adolescents: Disentangling between- and within-person effects

Background: Although research has demonstrated that parental psychological control is associated with the subjective well-being of adolescents, the lack of longitudinal studies that investigate whether or not bidirectional associations exist between the two and their potential mediating mechanisms has continued to date. In addition, previous studies have not rigorously distinguished between- and within-person effects. Thus, this study investigated longitudinal bidirectional associations between parental psychological control and the subjective wellbeing of adolescents. The study further examined the mediating role of emotion regulation ability. Methods: A total of 1365 Chinese adolescents (boys: 53.2 %; M age = 14.68 years, SD = 1.56) participated in a three-wave longitudinal study with annual assessments. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models were utilized to separate between- and within-person variation. Results: After controlling for between-person variance, the results revealed that adolescents with low levels of subjective well-being reported high levels of parental psychological control after one year. Emotion regulation ability played a bidirectional mediating role in the relationship between psychological control and subjective well-being. That is, psychological control and subjective well-being mutually influenced each other through emotion regulation ability. Limitations: Assessments of the key study variables were provided by adolescents. Moreover, the study considered a combination of the mothers' and fathers' use of psychological control without differentiating between paternal and maternal psychological control. Conclusions: The findings highlight the importance of interventions that target emotion regulation ability, which contributes to breaking the negative cycle between controlling parenting and the well-being of adolescents.