Parental Style, Dating Violence and Gender

The relationship between parenting styles and teen dating violence has become a relevant research topic in recent years, especially related to violence inflicted online. To more fully understand this relationship, the objective of the present study was to examine which parenting style (authoritarian, indulgent, authoritative, or neglectful) best protects against dating violence in adolescent relationships. A total of 1132 adolescents of both sexes participated in this study (46.4% boys and 53.6% girls), with ages between 14 and 18 years old (M = 15.6, SD = 1.3). A multivariate factorial design was applied (MANOVA, 4 × 2), using the parenting style, the parents’ gender, and the adolescents’ gender as independent variables, and the dating violence dimensions (online and offline) as dependent variables. As the results show, the lowest scores on all the dating violence dimensions examined were obtained by adolescents from indulgent families. In addition, three interaction effects were observed between the mother’s parenting style and the adolescent’s gender on online violence (e-violence and control), and the father’s parenting style on offline violence (verbal-emotional). Thus, adolescents with authoritarian mothers obtained the highest scores on violence and control inflicted online, respectively, and adolescent girls with authoritarian fathers obtained the highest scores on verbal-emotional violence. These findings suggest that the indulgent style is the parenting style that protects against violence in teen dating relationships, and they also highlight the risks of the authoritarian style as a family child-rearing model.

Results show the relationship between the parenting style and teen dating violence, and they show the relationship between the two contexts (online/offline) in adolescents who perform this type of violence. The results indicate that there is a significant relationship between authoritarian and neglectful parenting styles and dating violence in adolescence. Particularly, adolescents with authoritarian mothers obtained the highest scores on online violence (the boys on violence and the girls on control). The father’s authoritarian style was also related to the highest scores on verbal-emotional violence (especially in the girls). The lowest scores observed in all the dimensions of dating violence corresponded to the adolescents from families that used indulgent parenting. Muñiz-Rivas et al. (2019) remark that the findings of this study are especially important, given that the indulgent parenting style could be the most appropriate socialization style to prevent situations of violence in adolescent dating relationships (online and offline). The authors advise that "interventions designed to prevent and reduce dating violence should take the adolescents’ family context into account by analyzing, along with fathers and mothers, which parenting styles favor the healthiest couple relationships and the adequate psychosocial adjustment of boys and girls in offline and online contexts and the gender of both the parents and the adolescents should be taken into account" Muñiz-Rivas et al. (2019: 11).