A Study on Parenting Styles and Personality among Early Adults

This study uses a comparative approach to investigate how parenting styles are related to the development of adult personalities. The was conducted among 100 early adults. The instruments used were Perceived Parenting Style Scale and Ten Item Personality Inventory. The analysis used was Spearman rank Correlation. The results showed a strong association between parenting styles and personality qualities such as agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. Positive personality outcomes, such as increased levels of social competence and self-esteem, are linked to authoritative parenting. On the other hand, there is a correlation between higher neuroticism and poorer self-worth with authoritarian and inattentive parenting methods. Future research directions, parenting treatments, and psychological theory implications are considered.


Introduction
Everyone agrees that parenting plays a crucial role in a person's social and psychological development.The ways that parents raise their children have a significant impact on the formative years of their lives, and this influence ultimately shapes the way that children behave as adults.This resesarch investigates the connection between different parenting approaches and the maturation of personality traits in adults, offering a comparative study to clarify these dynamics.In psychology, parenting style is a pattern of behavior and attitude that parents display toward their children.Exactly speaking, it is concerned with how much dimensions such as demandingness or control and responsiveness or warmthower parents express in interactions with their children, hence having an effect on children's development concerning behavior, emotions, social skills, and several other types of developmental aspects.Some of the major styles are authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved, all of which have different consequences for children depending on the balance between control and support (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).The parenting style generally depicts how parents raise their children in terms of being strict or lenient and warm with them in a supporting way.It refers more precisely to the kind of rules set, the communication lines maintained with the children, and the type of guidance and discipline provided to the child.It can influence how children behave and feel about themselves, especially when growing up and relating to others (Baumrind, 1966)  Baumrind is considered a pioneer in the study of parenting style.She initially identified three main parenting styles that comprised: Authoritative where there is high demandingness and high responsiveness.Parents set clear rules, but are also warm and supportive.Authoritarian where there is high demandingness but low responsiveness.Parents enforce strict rules with little warmth or flexibility.
Permissive where there is low demandingness, high responsiveness.Parents are warm but set few rules or boundaries (Baumrind, 1966).

Objectives
To explore relationship between parenting style, personality, and its dimensions

Hypotheses
There is significant correlation between parenting style and personality.

Participants
Participant of the study consist of 100 early adults (aged between 18 and 30) from Hyderabad state of India.Sampling technique used was simple random sampling.The characteristics of sample are presented in table 1.

Instruments/tools used 1. The Perceived Parenting Style Scale (PPSS)
Dr. K. Manikandan developed the Perceived Parenting Style Scale, which represents a psychometric measure of perception by individuals about their parents' parenting methods.The measure reflects how a person looks back at the styles of parenting they were exposed to in him in early years, normally during childhood and adolescence.With a view to Baumrind's typology, the PPSS was designed to measure three major aspects: permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative parenting styles.The PPSS has shown high internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients for each subscale above the acceptable levels.
There are five possible answers provided for each question, which are Never (1), Rarely (2), Sometimes (3), Often (4) , and Always (5).The participant is required to put an 'X' mark in the corresponding question number in the answer sheet.The answers are all summed up domain wise and the domain with highest sum is considered as the dominating parenting style for that particular participant.

Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI)
The Ten-Item Personality Inventory is designed with ten items, including representations of two descriptors, scored on a Likert scale.It measures the Big Five, generally five dimensions of personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (Neuroticism), and Openness to Experience.Due to its briefness, the TIPI is regarded as satisfactory even if it has less internal consistency than longer inventories like the NEO-PI-3 or the Big Five Inventory (BFI).Retest reliability has proven to be sufficient.The TIPI accurately reflects the Big Five dimensions and has strong convergent and discriminant validity.It also exhibits good correlation with longer personality assessments.The participant is asked to write a number in front of the question, that shall indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree to the statement given.The numbers assigned are as follows, Disagree strongly (1), disagree moderately (2), disagree a little (3), neither agree nor disagree (4), agree a little (5), agree moderately (6) and agree strongly (7).There are a total of 10 questions that are divided into 5 domains and each domain has one regular scoring item and one reverse scoring item.The reverse scoring items are denoted at 'R'.

Procedure
This research utilized a random sampling technique; data collection is carried out using a Google Forms survey, which includes the Perceived Parenting Style Scale (PPSS) and Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI).The participants were asked consent before participation and assured the confidentiality of demographic details.The participants were encouraged to fill the form honestly.After collecting the data the responses were scored according to manual in spread sheet and then scores were analyzed in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) for data analysis.

Results and discussion
To understand the distribution of variables, basic descriptive statistics such as arithmetic mean, median, mode, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis were calculated and given in Table 2.The Table 2 depicts the descriptive statistics of the study Variables.The value of the arithmetic mean, median and mode, standard deviation along with the Skewness and Kurtosis of the variables have been mentioned which are the domain of parenting styles and personality development.The table values indicate that the collected data was not normally distributed and suitable for non-parametric statistical analysis.
The table 3 presents the correlation between parenting style and personality traits and their significance levels (2-tailed) for various psychological and behavioral measures.These measures include authoritative, authoritarian, permissive domains of parenting styles, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.For that Spearman Rank correlation was performed.
Understanding these correlations provides insights into the relationships between different variables.

Conclusion
The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of parenting style on adult personality.How parents treat their kids, how they treat their achievements, flaws and mistakes, the tone they talk to them, all of them influence the formation of personality.
According to the correlation's result, authoritative parenting is linked to higher levels of authoritarianism.
The findings also suggest that there may be a correlation between greater permissive parenting scores and higher authoritarian parenting scores.The more conscientious people are likely to perceive or have experienced more authoritative parenting, and less authoritarian or permissive parenting.Perceived parenting styles significantly reflect specific parenting beliefs.Emotional stability is positively correlated with authoritarian and negatively correlated with authoritative, suggesting that emotionally stable individuals may experience less authoritarian and more authoritative parenting.Conscientiousness demonstrates a positive correlation with authoritarian and a negative correlation with permissive parenting, suggesting that more conscientious individuals likely perceive or have experienced more authoritative and less authoritarian or permissive parenting.

Implications of the Study
This study can help in spreading the public awareness; understanding parenting style might help future generation to be more considerate.The study can help in building new intervention or upgrading standardized test utilizing its information of different demographics.Understanding parenting and personality can help in Education and Counselling by providing better understanding of individuals.The study can be useful to tailor interventions to account for potential gender differences in mobile parenting style and personality.Conduct of longitudinal studies to better understand the long-term parenting style.
Maccoby and Martin (1983)  expanded on Baumrind's work, adding a fourth style: Uninvolved/Neglectful where there is low demandingness, low responsiveness.Parents are disengaged, providing limited guidance and nurturing.Darling and Steinberg (1993) defined parenting style as "a constellation of attitudes toward the child that are communicated to the child and that, taken together, create an emotional climate in which the parents' behaviors are expressed.Gottman and DeClaire (1997) conducted a study on emotional aspects of parenting and identified four styles: Dismissing (parents who trivialize or dismiss children's emotions), Disapproving (parents who are critical of children's emotional expressions), Laissez Faire (parents who accept emotions but offer little guidance), and Emotion Coaching (parents who validate feelings and guide children through emotional experiences).Grolnick and Ryan (1989) emphasized the importance of autonomy support in parenting and defined three dimensions: Autonomy Support (encouraging independent problem-solving), Structure (providing clear and consistent guidelines), and Involvement (being engaged in the child's life).Psychology has given a great deal of attention to the connection between parenting practices and the emergence of adult personality traits.Numerous psychological theories provide frameworks for comprehending the ways in which various parenting philosophies affect the formation of personality.According to attachment theory (John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth), early parent-child relationships have a big impact on how people develop as people.Secure Attachment, this type of attachment, which results from attentive and reliable caring, gives children and adolescents a sense of security and self-worth that improves their relationships and self-worth as adults.Insecure Attachment, which arises from uneven or careless nurturing, can cause relational problems, low self-esteem, and elevated anxiety and depression (Bowlby & Ainsworth, 1969).Personality is determined by both genetic predispositions and life experiences, so it has a very huge bearing on how a person thinks, feels, and behaves throughout his life.Gordon Allport (1937) suggests that "Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment."Raymond Cattell (1950s) defined personality as "that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation."He developed the 16 Personality Factor model.Carl Rogers (1959) from a humanistic perspective, defined personality in terms of the self-concept, "The organized, consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself."Personality is a rather unique set of very enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors symbolizing an individual's consistent way of response to and relating with the world.It is generally that which brings together traits, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors somewhat stable over time and across situations, hence shaping how one perceives themselves and others and how they behave in various social contexts.Albert Bandura's social learning theory states that kids pick up their parents' behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions by watching and imitating them.Modeling indicates Parents act as examples for their children.Children raised by authoritative parents who exhibit well-balanced behavior and proficient problem-solving abilities are likely to acquire such features.Parents can influence their children's personality traits and coping systems by using reinforcement and punishment to reward or penalize certain actions (Bandura, 1986).Many researches highlighted the relationship between parenting style and personality traits.Tehrani et al. (2024) offers evidence that parenting styles are important correlates of personality traits among adolescents.Hardjanto & Triman (2024) foun that one of the teenage development tasks that occurred throughout the transition to maturity was personality development.One of the things that influences an adolescent's personality is their parenting style.According toAsad et al. (2023), the student's personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience were found to be high and conscientiousness and neuroticism personality trait were moderate.Rishi et al. (2023) found an association of the authoritative parenting style with positive outcomes in children regarding higher self-esteem, better school achievement, and fewer behavior problems, characterized by high levels of warmth, responsiveness, and control.The need and significance of studying predominant parenting styles and their impact on personality development are paramount in understanding the foundational elements of psychological growth and behavioral patterns.This study can clarify how common parenting styles-authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, and uninvolved-affect kids' emotional, social, and cognitive development by identifying and evaluating different styles.Understanding this information is essential for psychologists, educators, and legislators since it sheds light on how personality traits, coping strategies, and general mental health develop.Furthermore, by developing healthier parent-child connections, treatments and support systems can be developed with an understanding of these dynamics, thereby enhancing the resilience and wellbeing of future generations.This means that the study has important ramifications for encouraging good parenting techniques and improving children's developmental results from a variety of socioeconomic and cultural origins.

Table 1
depicts the characteristics of total participants in the study, 52.38 percentile are male and 47.62 percentile are female, that is, 55 male and 50 female participants were included in the study.

Table 3 Correlation between parenting style and personality traits.
.222 * .375**.35**.356**-*p<0.01,**p<0.05Table3resultsshow that there is a negative correlation with Authoritative (r=-.474,p< .01),suggesting that there is higher authoritarian parenting is associated with lower authoritative parenting.and there is positive correlation with Permissive (r=.550, p< .01),indicating that higher scores in authoritarian parenting might coincide with higher permissive parenting scores.The Conscientiousness shows a that there is a positive correlation with Authoritative (r=.380, p< .01)and there is negative correlations with Authoritarian (r=-.395,p< .01)and Permissive (r=-.223,p< .05),which indicates that more conscientious individuals likely perceive or have experienced more authoritative and less authoritarian or permissive parenting, and Emotional Stability is negatively correlated with Authoritarian (r=-.483,p< .01)and positively correlated with Authoritative (r=.245, p< .05),which indicates that the more the emotionally stable individual may experience less authoritarian and more authoritative parenting.The parenting style includes authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles.Where in the personality includes the following traits, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, emotional stability and conscientiousness.The result of correlation suggests that higher authoritarian parenting is associated with lower authoritative parenting.The results also indicate that the higher scores in authoritarian parenting might coincide with higher permissive parenting scores.The perceived parenting styles strongly reflect specific parenting attitudes; the more conscientious individuals likely perceive or have experienced more authoritative and less authoritarian or permissive parenting.The more emotionally stable individuals may experience less authoritarian and more authoritative parenting.The Conscientiousness shows a that there is a positive correlation with Authoritative and there is negative correlations with Authoritarian and Permissive which indicates that more conscientious individuals likely perceive or have experienced more authoritative and less authoritarian or permissive parenting, and Emotional Stability is negatively correlated with Authoritarian and positively correlated with Authoritative which indicates that the more the emotionally stable individual may experience less authoritarian and more authoritative parenting.
Tehrani et al. (2024)*-* The results of the study is in support by a study conducted byTehrani et al. (2024).The results entail that authoritative parenting style would be positively related to openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness, but negatively related to neuroticism.The study offers evidence that parenting styles are important correlates of personality traits among adults.