Development of Prosocial Behavior in Spanish Adolescents and Its Relations to Parenting Styles

The goal of this chapter is to describe how parenting relates to prosocial development in Spanish adolescents. Although not a lot of work has been done on Spanish youth, the work that has been done has largely paralleled the work done on European American youth. We present evidence from a longitudinal study that examines how support and communication, psychological control, and permissiveness from both mothers and fathers change across adolescence and relate to prosocial behavior in a large sample of Spanish adolescents. Adolescent prosocial behavior was relatively stable. Both mothers and fathers became more permissive and supportive across adolescence, but less psychologically controlling. Prosocial behavior was bidirectionally related to aspects of parenting across time. We highlight the ways in which these findings are both similar to and different from the work in other cultures.