Revisiting Maternal and Paternal Parenting Styles: Differentiating Latent Profiles and Associations With Psychosocial Outcomes of Chinese Adolescents in a National Sample of Parent-Child Dyads.

INTRODUCTION Parent-child interactions constitute a critical developmental context for the psychosocial adjustment of adolescents. This study aimed to differentiate parenting styles and examine their domain-specific effects on later adolescent outcomes, using a culturally sensitive, person-centered approach.

Methods

This study employed latent profile analysis (LPA) on a national sample of 8333 Chinese parent-adolescent dyads (4564 mother-child and 3769 father-child dyads) from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS). At baseline, adolescents were aged 12.93 years on average (SD = 0.82), and 51.5% of them were boys. Analyses were conducted separately for the full sample of parents, mothers, and fathers to identify distinct parenting profiles and their subsequent influence on adolescent academic difficulty, deviant peer affiliation, and depression.

Results

A robust four-profile structure namely Authoritative, Managerial, Warm Harbor, and Disengaged was identified for the full and maternal samples. Crucially, a unique five-profile structure emerged for fathers, featuring an additional Emotionally Detached profile characterized by average discipline but extremely low warmth. Further analyses revealed that the Authoritative and Warm Harbor profiles were associated with more favorable outcomes across all domains, particularly in mother-child dyads. For father-child dyads, the Emotionally Detached profile was uniquely associated with higher academic difficulty, deviant peer affiliation, and depression.

Conclusions

These findings underscore the necessity of using gender-differentiated, person-centered approaches to understand culturally configured parenting and its consequences. Moving beyond uniform theoretical models, these results inform more targeted research and family support practices.