Parenting styles and its relations with personal and social adjustment beyond adolescence: Is the current evidence enough?

This study examines the relationship between parenting styles (authoritarian, indulgent, authoritative, and neglectful) and its relations with personal and social adjustment beyond adolescence. Participants were 2131 Spanish children, divided into adolescents (n = 616), young adults (n = 606), middle-aged adults (n = 502) and older adults (n = 407). A MANOVA (4 x 2 x 4) with parenting style, sex and age as independent variables was applied. Personal adjustment criteria were emotional and physical self-concept, and nervousness, while social adjustment criteria were internalization of social values and hostile sexism. The indulgent and authoritative parenting styles showed better socialization outcomes in all adjustment criteria across all children ages. However, children from indulgent families scored higher on emotional self-concept and lower on hostile sexism and nervousness than those from authoritative families. These findings seriously question whether strictness parenting dimension is necessary not only during the parental socialization (for adolescent children) but also beyond adolescence (for adult children), once parental socialization is over.