Perceived Mother and Father Parenting and Adolescent Social Anxiety Symptoms: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract Social anxiety symptoms peak in adolescence, a period of heightened vulnerability due to normative cognitive, affective, and social changes. Although both parents have robust influences on social anxiety symptoms, popular theory suggests fathers play a particularly salient role in the manifestation of these symptoms. Yet, studies examining unique parental contributions yield mixed findings in this area. Moreover, existing parenting meta-analyses have exclusively considered mothers’ and fathers’ parenting behaviors on social anxiety independently, thereby mischaracterizing their unique contributions by overlooking their shared “interparental” covariance. This review fills this gap by employing a meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) approach to jointly estimate the unique and shared effects of maternal and paternal warm and controlling behaviors on youth social anxiety symptoms. Independent models replicated prior findings, linking maternal/paternal warmth and control to social anxiety symptoms with small-to-medium effect sizes. However, the joint MASEM models offer insights beyond previous findings. Particularly, mothers’ and fathers’ warmth had reduced, but unique, comparably sized small associations with adolescent social anxiety symptoms. Further, only maternal control was uniquely linked to increased symptomology and paternal control was nonsignificant. Findings underscore the distinct roles of mothers and fathers in adolescent social anxiety and demonstrate the utility of the MASEM approach in disentangling unique parenting effects on children's development.