Chapter 1 12 actively soliciting information of one’s children’s whereabouts and activities (Barber, 1996; Stattin & Kerr, 2000). At appropriate levels, behavioral control is thought to protect against adolescent malfunctioning, especially by preventing or reducing externalizing problems, such as delinquency (Stattin & Kerr, 2000) and substance use (Koning et al., 2020). However, in more recent work, behavioral control has also been suggested to undermine adolescents’ autonomy and, therefore, hinder adolescents’ psychosocial functioning. That is, when parents exert too much behavioral control or when the domain of control touches on personal domains, such as prohibition of friendships (Kakihara & Tilton-weaver, 2009; Keijsers et al., 2012), parental behavioral control may be hindering rather than helping. Therefore, based on the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), a conceptual distinction has been made between promotive practices that provide structure (e.g., rule setting, monitoring, and feedback) and hindering, harsh practices (e.g., hostility, criticism, and punishment) (Soenens et al., 2019). Meta-analyses that differentiated between “behavioral control” (i.e., rule setting and monitoring) and “harsh control” indeed show that adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems are negatively associated with behavioral control but positively associated with harsh control at the group level (Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b). Thus, adolescents whose parents provide more structure and are less harsh toward them have shown better psychosocial functioning on average than adolescents whose parents provide less structure and are harsher. In addition to behavioral control, a second type of parental control has been identified and labeled as psychological control. The fourth parenting dimension psychological control involves the regulation of adolescents’ thoughts and emotions. This can be done by manipulative parenting practices, including intrusiveness, guilt induction, and love withdrawal (Barber, 1996; Barber et al., 2012). According to the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), psychologically controlling parenting is thought to hinder adolescent psychosocial functioning because it undermines adolescents’ autonomy and competence (Barber, 1996; Soenens et al., 2019). Indeed, meta-analyses indicate that parental psychological control and related practices, such as withdrawal, rejection, and aversiveness, show one of the strongest links with internalizing (McLeod, Weisz, et al., 2007; Pinquart, 2017b; Yap et al., 2014) and externalizing problems at the group level (Hoeve et al., 2009; Pinquart, 2017a). Hence, adolescents who experience relatively high levels of parental psychological control show worse psychosocial functioning on average than adolescents who experience lower levels of parental psychological control. Over the past few decades, theoretical parenting work has attempted to understand which parenting dimensions and how they are linked to the development of adolescent (mal)
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