Are you an authoritative parent?

Trying to have too much control over your children’s lives may not be a good idea, for they tend to take it negatively, says a new study.

The study, conducted in the United States by researchers at Orebro University in Sweden, looked at how adolescents view and react to parental control.

Parental control falls into two categories: behavioural control (when parents help their children regulate themselves and feel competent by providing supervision, setting limits, and establishing rules) and psychological control (when parents are manipulative in their behaviour, often resulting in feelings of guilt, rejection, or not being loved). It's thought that behavioural control is better for youngsters' development. However, when parents are very controlling, young people no longer make this distinction and view both types of parental control negatively.

The study, which asked 67 American children (7th and 8th graders, as well as 10th and 11th graders) to respond to hypothetical scenarios involving both kinds of control, found that the youths put a negative spin on both types of control when the parents in the scenarios exercised a lot of control.

Specifically, when parents showed moderate levels of control, they saw psychological control more negatively than behavioural control, but when parents were very controlling, they viewed both types of control negatively. Specifically, the youths interpreted high levels of control as intrusive and as indicating that they mattered less as individuals.

Intrusiveness is a hallmark of psychological control, according to the researchers, and both high levels of psychological control and feeling that you don't matter have been linked to poorer adjustment.

"Under some conditions, such as when personal choice is restricted, adolescents view behavioural control as negatively as psychological control. Such negative interpretations may mean that adolescents would respond as poorly to highly restrictive behavioral control as they do to psychological control," the authors said.