When Does Strict Parenting Hurt? Cultural Meaning and Immigration Generation in Chinese-Canadian Families

<p>Decades of Western research have established strict, controlling (“authoritarian”) parenting as a risk factor for adolescent mental health, but this conclusion may not transfer to Chinese-heritage families, in which firm parental control is often culturally normative. We reasoned that cultural normativeness resides in the adolescent’s interpretive frame, and that this frame shifts with acculturation across immigration generations. We therefore tested whether generation moderates the association in Chinese-Canadian adolescent–parent dyads: parents reported their own parenting, and adolescents independently reported anxiety and depressive symptoms. Parent-reported authoritarian parenting was unrelated to symptoms in the pooled sample, but the association depended on generation: it was absent among first-generation adolescents and positive among second-generation adolescents. The emotional cost of firm parental control therefore appears to depend on the adolescent’s interpretive frame rather than on the parenting behaviour itself.</p>