Citation

Huang CY, Hsieh YP, Shen ACT, Wei HS, Feng JY, Hwa HL, Feng JY. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019; 16(6): e16061049.

Affiliation

Department of Social Work, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan. yencertain@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph16061049

PMID

30909532

Abstract

The current study examines the relationship between parents' and children's reports of parenting and their effects on children's mental health symptoms. Six hundred and sixty-six parent-child dyads in Taiwan participated in this study. The parents and the children filled out the parenting questionnaires, and the children also reported their general mental health. The results demonstrated that parental-reported and child-perceived parenting were positively correlated, but parents tended to report lower scores on authoritarian parenting and higher scores on Chinese parenting than did their children. There were also significant gender differences: The mothers reported higher authoritative parenting than did the fathers; and the boys perceived higher authoritarian and Chinese-culture specific parenting than did the girls. Moreover, the Chinese parenting had a negative effect on children's mental health outcomes. Finally, our results showed that children's perception of parenting had a stronger effect on children's mental health symptoms than did parental reports on parenting, urging future research to include the children's report when investigating the effects of parenting on children's mental health outcomes.

Language: en

Keywords

child mental health; culture; gender differences; parenting