Influence of Parenting Styles on Mental Health of Adolescents

Abstract

Positive mental health is a key factor in maintaining good health status. A good mental health is very essential for a person to deal with daily stresses of his/her life, and it is also an important component of total health. Present study makes an attempt to study the influence of parenting styles on mental health of adolescents studying in and around Mysore city.  A sample of 200  subjects whose age ranged between 10 to 14 years were considered as early adolescents and 200 subjects whose age ranged between 15 to 19 years were considered as late adolescents in the present study. Thus a total sample of 400 subjects (200 boys and 200 girls) from in and around Mysore city were randomly selected as the participants of the study. They were provided with Parental authority questionnaire (PAQ; Buri, 1991) to measure perceived parenting styles and GHQ-28 (Goldberg, 1978) to measure mental health of the participants. The data was subjected to Two-way ANOVA. Results revealed that, Parenting styles did not have significant influence over mental health of the adolescents in somatic symptoms, anxiety, social dysfunction, depression and total scores. Late adolescent’s expressed more somatic symptoms, anxiety, social dysfunction, depression than early adolescents. In general, this study showed that the developmental stages had considerable effect on the general health of both early and late adolescents.