Impact of Parenting Styles on Social Anxiety among Young Adults

Social anxiety which is characterised by constant apprehension amid social scrutiny has a great impact on the disruption of psychosocial functioning among the young adults. Although the environmental and biological factors have a role to play in its etiology, the parenting styles such as authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful, have distinctive roles in the development of emotional regulation and competence that develops social competence. In this research, perceived maternal and paternal parenting styles were linked with the level of social anxiety in young adults (Age 20-25) of Indian descent hoping to fill the gaps in cultural and developmental literature. This was a quantitative correlational study where 154 participants were used in the survey using Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) and Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS). Both maternal and paternal Pearson correlations indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between authoritarian parenting and social anxiety (r = .19, p = .02). Regression analyses showed the trend of maternal authoritarianism predicting higher levels of social anxiety (B = 0.83, p = .06), but the total model was not significant, (R²= .05, p= .28). A two-way ANOVA established the non-existence of an interaction effect between the maternal and paternal style (p = .61) implying that parenting congruence was not a factor. Major findings support the priority of maternal parenting in acquisition of social anxiety, coherent with the attachment theory that advocates early parental care. The implications on clinical practice show that family-based interventions should be aimed at changing maternal responsiveness and autonomy support. These are limited by the designs such as cross-sectional and biases in the self-report.