UC Riverside

Psychologically controlling and autonomy supportive parenting practices have been consistently shown to predict children’s academic and psychosocial functioning, yet the precursors of these behaviors remain relatively unclear. To shed light on the cognitive precedents of such parenting practices, the current study focused on parents’ child-based worth, a tendency for parents to base their self-esteem on their children’s accomplishments. Departing from a primary focus on child-based worth in the academic domain, the current study examined the role of mothers’ child-based worth across various domains of child development, including virtue, academic competence, and physical appearance. Furthermore, given the role of perceived pressure in intrusive parenting, the moderating roles of internal (e.g., prevention focus) and external pressure (e.g., perceived environmental threat) in the association between child-based worth and parenting behaviors were explored. In the current study, 302 mothers (Mage = 42.16, SDage = 8.54) of early to middle adolescents (ages from 10 to 17) recruited through Qualtrics Panel reported on their child-based worth, parenting practices, and additional pressure-related factors (e.g., regulatory focus, perceived environmental threat). Results showed that mothers based their self-worth on children’s academic competence to a greater extent than the virtue and physical appearance domains. Mothers who based their self-worth on children’s virtue and physical appearance tended to endorse higher levels of psychological control. In addition, child-based worth in physical appearance was associated with dampened autonomy support. Interaction analyses revealed that mothers’ characteristics related to internal pressure, such as prevention focus and emotion dysregulation, interacted with child-based worth dimensions in predicting psychological control. Little evidence was found to support hypotheses regarding the role of external pressure. Overall, the implications of child-based worth were larger and more consistent in predicting psychological control than autonomy support. Together, findings from this study augment our understanding of the roles of multiple domains of mothers’ child-based self-worth in parenting behaviors and how these associations may be modulated by other factors related to perceived pressure.