The role of parents' control and autonomy support in the United States and China: beyond children's reports

Abstract

Recent research on the effects of parents’ control (i.e., intruding into children’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior) on children’s psychological functioning in the United States and China has almost exclusively relied on children’s reports. Such reports may lead to inaccurate conclusions if they do not reflect parents’ practices to the same extent in the two countries. The current research addressed this issue in a study of 394 American and Chinese children (mean age = 13.45 years) and mothers. Children and mothers reported on mothers’ controlling and autonomy-supportive parenting; trained observers coded such parenting during a laboratory interaction between children and mothers. Information on children’s achievement was obtained. Children’s reports of parenting were modestly associated with mothers’ reports and weakly, if at all, with observers’ reports, with no difference in United States and China. The effects of parenting on children’s achievement were largely similar in the two countries, irrespective of reporter. Taken together, the current research indicates that the similarity of the effects of American and Chinese parents’ control documented in prior research is unlikely to be an artifact of differential correspondence between children’s reports and parents’ actual practices in the two countries.