Associations between parenting styles and child self-regulation skills: A series of meta-analyses.

Abstract

Children's self-regulation skills have important developmental implications for a variety of outcomes, and parenting practices are instrumental in shaping these self-regulatory skills. Given the variations in associations observed across different populations and inconsistencies in measurement methods, we specifically evaluate different dimensions of parenting styles regarding how behaviors promote, suppress, or passively contribute to child independence and development of self-regulation skills. We utilize a meta-analytic approach to investigate whether different types of parenting engagement predict children's self-regulation abilities and evaluate moderation effects attributed to measurement strategies, sample characteristics, study design, and publication source qualities. Random-effects models with the 62 total included studies yielded significant main effects for supportive (k = 42) parenting and suppressive (k = 50) parenting, but not passive (k = 10) parenting. Parenting style reporting method was confirmed to be a significant moderator for supportive parenting, suppressive parenting, and passive parenting. Findings of the present study emphasize the benefits of supportive parenting and the detriments of suppressive parenting in fostering self-regulation skills across childhood and adolescence. While the directionality of these associations was unsurprising, the alignment in magnitude and therefore near-perfectly antagonistic roles for establishing children's independent regulation is a striking new contribution to developmental science. The inclusion of passive parenting did not yield significant main effects for the child self-regulation outcome, but the positive trend observed provides a baseline for future reviews to build upon. Implications for these meta-analyses include tailoring of intervention programs to include responsive parenting practices and strategies to reduce punitive discipline approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).