Relationship between Parenting Styles, Attachment Styles & Emotion Regulation of College Students

Abstract

These parenting styles influence children’s thought processes and later affect various attachment styles that they adapt to make friends, to socialize or to find love. These parenting styles also play a major role in the regulation of emotions. Various studies have been conducted in the past to understand the relationship amongst different parenting styles, style of attachments and emotion regulation, but as the current scenarios are evolving and adapting the rapid growth of advanced technologies, more such researches are needed to better understand the current youth’s psychology which can further help influencing the future generation in a positive way. This study aimed to study the relationship between parenting styles, attachment styles and emotion regulation of college students and also the influence of parenting styles on attachment styles and emotion regulation. Total of 133 college students within the age range of 18 years to 30 years were taken as the sample size of the study using scales like Parental Authority Questionnaire, Revised Adult Attachment Scale – close relationships version and Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale – 18. The data was analyzed using Pearson’s Correlation on SPSS version 29. The results indicated that Authoritative parenting style of both the parents is the dominating style amongst other styles (permissive and authoritarian). The top two attachment styles of college students so developed, are ‘Depend’ and ‘Anxious’.  Whereas the highest difficulties in emotion regulation faced by students are ‘Impulse’ and ‘Non-Acceptance subscales. Some significant relations between Mothers’ and Fathers’ Authoritarian and Authoritative Parenting Style and some scales of adult attachment style and difficulty of emotion regulation were found. ‘Close’ attachment style was found to have negative but significant relations with ‘clarity’, ‘goals’ & ‘strategies’ of difficulty of emotion regulation. ‘Depend’ attachment style was also found to have negative but significant relations with ‘goals’, ‘impulse’ & ‘strategies’ of difficulty of emotion regulation. ‘Anxiety’ attachment style had significantly positive relations with all subscales of difficulty of emotion regulation except ‘non-acceptance’. However, all the hypotheses were rejected as all the subscales of the three variables were not significantly correlated.