Parental Overprotection and Anxiety among Adolescents: A Correlational Study

Parental overprotection, which combines high control with low encouragement of autonomy, has been linked to anxiety in young people, but findings are mixed. This correlational, cross-sectional online survey examined whether adolescents? reports of parental overprotection were related to their anxiety. Participants were 86 school-going adolescents aged 13 to 18 years (M = 15.58, SD = 1.60; 43 girls, 40 boys, 3 who preferred not to say), recruited by convenience (snowball) sampling. They completed the brief current form of the Parental Bonding Instrument (overprotection = control minus autonomy items, averaged across mother and father) and the child version of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED). Overprotection was not significantly related to anxiety, Spearman ρ(82) = .09, 95% CI [-.13, .30], p = .415, and results were similar for mothers, fathers, and in sensitivity analyses. The study could detect only correlations of about .30 or larger, and the overprotection scores had low reliability, so the result is inconclusive. Anxiety scores were high: 79.1% scored at or above the SCARED cut-off of 25. Larger samples and more reliable measures are needed.