Psychologically controlling parents of anti-social emerging adults

Parenting is a developmental process and encourages the child to become an independent adult in society, an adult who is pro-social rather than anti-social. The main aim of parenting is to control the behaviour of the child, but as the child matures the approach is more of monitoring and supervision rather than control. The aim of this study is to establish the prevalence of parental psychological control during the phase of emerging adulthood and this will be associated with the anti-social behaviour of emerging adults. A quantitative methodological approach was used to conduct the study. A sample of 382 participants aged 18 to 25 years participated in the study. The Parental Psychological Control (Barber, 1996) and the Anti-Social Behaviour (Achenbach and Edelbrock, 1987) questionnaires were used to collect the data. Furthermore, antisocial behaviour is also positively predicted by both mother and father psychological control, with mothers being significantly more psychologically controlling than fathers. When comparing males and females, males engaged significantly more in antisocial activities than females; males also found fathers to be more psychologically controlling.