Psychological Intimate Partner Violence,Insecure Attachment,and Parental Psychological Control from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood

Abstract

We examine if psychological intimate partner violence (pIPV) is predicted by parental psychological control (PPC) via insecure attachment. Our results analyzing longitudinal data from the Child Development Project show that PPC perceived at age 16 predicts insecure attachment at age 18, which then predicts pIPV at age 24. Moreover, the paths with attachment anxiety are consistently significant while ones with attachment avoidance are not. Further, all the paths are significant regardless of the gender of the adolescents and parents, which indicates that PPC is detrimental regardless of the gender of the adolescents or parents. Lastly, PPC perceived at age 16 does not directly predict pIPV at age 24, which suggests that social learning theory of aggression (Bandura, 1978) may not explain the association from PPC to pIPV. Our results suggest that research and practice would benefit by considering PPC as an antecedent of pIPV via insecure attachment from adolescence to emerging adulthood.

Keywords

parental psychological control attachment intimate partner violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a grave worldwide issue (Straus, 2008). It refers to harmful and destructive behaviors within dating relationships (Follingstad, 2007), and psychological IPV (pIPV) involves verbal or symbolic acts to inflict emotional pain or fear (Velotti et al., 2018). Finding antecedents of pIPV matters to prevent it. However, parental psychological control (PPC) was hardly investigated as an antecedent of pIPV. We examine whether PPC predicts pIPV via insecure attachment.

PPC refers to a set of intrusive parenting techniques that emotionally manipulate children to obey their parents (Choe & Read, 2019). First, intrusiveness entails that parents intervene for matters that do not require parental intervention. Secondly, emotionally manipulative PPC techniques such as instilling guilt, shaming, withdrawing love, invalidating feelings, constraining verbal expressions, and attacking personally (Olsen et al., 2002) are adopted to play tricks on children’s minds (Barber et al., 2012; Choe & Read, 2019). These two aspects differentiate PPC from other parenting constructs (Choe et al., 2019).

Attachment refers to an affectional tie to a specific individual (Ainsworth, 1969) and adult attachment is typically conceptualized in two dimensions: attachment anxiety and avoidance (Collins & Read, 1990). Attachment anxiety refers to the extent to which people feel secure about the availability and responsiveness of their significant other (e.g., I trust that my romantic partner will get back to me). Individuals with the anxious attachment style worry that their romantic partner will not respond to their needs (Rholes & Simpson, 2004), ergo they have relationships including jealousy, emotional highs and lows, and obsessive preoccupation with their romantic partners (Collins & Read, 1990). Moreover, attachment avoidance describes the extent to which people feel comfortable being close to or depending on others (e.g., I enjoy being around my romantic partner). Individuals with the avoidant attachment style tend to not feel comfortable with being close to someone else, ergo they avoid close relationships and engage in fewer affectionate behaviors such as mutual gazing or cuddling when in a relationship (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Contrarily, securely attached individuals trust that their romantic partners will respond to their needs and feel comfortable to depend on their partners.

Insecure Attachment and pIPV

First, high attachment anxiety may facilitate pIPV. Individuals with the anxious attachment style were suggested to have a lower threshold for threat (e.g., rivals) than securely attached individuals and display strong and negative emotional responses to negative relationship events (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005). Accordingly, individuals with the anxious attachment style may more likely construe their romantic partner’s behavior as a threat and try to keep their romantic partners close to them by exhibiting pIPV behaviors. Empirically, relationship anxiety predicted pIPV (McDermott et al., 2017), and attachment anxiety was positively correlated with pIPV (Owens et al., 2014).

In addition, high avoidance may also predict pIPV. Avoidance was theorized to include passive-aggressive hostility and criticism of the partner motivated by fear of closeness (Mayseless, 1991). Similarly, pIPV was suggested as a way that people with the avoidant attachment style control and manipulate their romantic partners (Velotti et al., 2018). Individuals with the avoidant attachment style may experience discomfort with their partners. Then they may try to control closeness and create distance between their romantic partners and themselves by exhibiting pIPV behaviors (Gormley, 2005). Empirically, attachment avoidance predicted pIPV (McDermott et al., 2017) and was related to a hostile and aggressive interpersonal style (Cummings-Robeau et al., 2009). A recent review showed a link between avoidance and pIPV as well (Velotti et al., 2018).

Insecure Attachment and PPC

PPC was argued to threaten the parent–child relationship (Barber, 1996), and PPC strategies may undermine felt security that children’s close relationship to their caregivers provides (Bowlby, 1969). Essentially, children do not receive affection from their parents unless they give up their autonomy and obey their parents (Choe & Read, 2019). Since insecure attachment with one’s parents has been shown to predict adult attachment (Hazan & Shaver, 1987), the insecurely attached children may have trouble bonding with their romantic partners. Empirically, PPC perceived by adolescents predicted more attachment anxiety and avoidance (Pittman et al., 2012; Xiang & Liu, 2018). Moreover, PPC perceived by adolescents predicted insecure attachment in Denmark (Breinholst et al., 2015) and China (Cai et al., 2013).

PPC may facilitate attachment anxiety. When parents withhold love from them and invalidate feelings, children may become uncertain of their caregivers’ protection: that parents will not respond to their needs unless they please their parents. Adult romantic love has been argued to bear many similarities to the early attachment process (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Similarly, emerging adults who were psychologically controlled as adolescents may also feel anxious about their romantic partners’ availability to them.

PPC may also increase attachment avoidance. When parents constantly attempt to change and control adolescents, adolescents may not believe that they can be themselves around their parents. Then the discomfort may motivate adolescents to run away from their parents. Similarly, individuals with the avoidant attachment style tend to adopt deactivating strategies (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016) to degrade the importance of their relationship or their romantic partner (e.g., Cassidy & Shaver, 2003) and put distance between themselves and their partners.

PPC and pIPV

Previous research suggests two possible relations between PPC and pIPV. First, PPC may predict pIPV. Perceived PPC was positively correlated with interpersonal aggression among Dutch adolescents (Houtepen et al., 2018). If social learning theory (Bandura, 1978) applies to the relationship between PPC and pIPV, PPC will directly predict pIPV. This explanation assumes that children perceive PPC as aggression (Choe & Read, 2019). However, little research has explored whether social learning theory explains pIPV in its association with PPC.

Alternatively, PPC may not directly predict pIPV. Because PPC threatens the relationship between parents and adolescents (Barber, 1996), it may foster insecure attachment in romantic relationships, which then may facilitate pIPV as the aforementioned reasoning. Since PPC took place in parent–child relationships, pIPV may manifest in their romantic relationships rather than in general.

The Most Consistent Mediator

Between attachment anxiety and avoidance, and their roles in predicting negative outcomes, previous research showed conflicting results. One line of research showed that avoidance more strongly predicted negative developmental outcomes than anxiety (Lafontaine et al., 2020; Lawson & Malnar, 2011). However, other researchers reported that attachment anxiety predicted IPV more strongly than avoidance (see a meta-analysis Velotti et al., 2020).

Gender Differences

When adolescents notice PPC, boys and girls may respond to PPC differently. Based on previous studies showing that men are more avoidant than women (Gloger-Tippelt & Kappler, 2016; Schmitt, 2003) and women are more anxious than men (Del Giudice, 2019; Turner, 1991), boys may become more avoidant than girls, and girls more anxious than boys in response to PPC. On the other hand, gender differences may not occur. PPC has been argued to be universally detrimental (Choe & Read, 2019; Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010), ergo the gender of adolescents may not matter in how people respond to PPC.

In addition, an effect by the gender of the parent may exist. Only maternal psychological control (mPC), but not paternal psychological control (pPC), may facilitate insecure attachment, which then predicts pIPV. Mothers spend more alone time with their children than fathers (Russell & Russell, 1987), further increasing mothers’ opportunities to influence adolescent personality and emotional development. Alternatively, both mPC and pPC may hamper children’s personality and emotional development. PPC was argued to be harmful to everyone (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010) and is disrespectful in nature by playing tricks on children’s minds (Barber et al., 2012; Choe & Read, 2019). Hence, it may not matter from which parent adolescents experience PPC. Moreover, fathering has been neglected in the previous research literature (Cabrera et al., 2018), and only a few studies have investigated pPC (Choe et al., 2019).

Developmental Frame: From Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood

The life course perspective (Elder & Rockwell, 1979) states that what people experience in the family can shape and change their later developmental trajectories. Accordingly, PPC in adolescence may impact the quality of romantic relationships and pIPV in emerging adulthood. During adolescence, age 16 is a time when adolescents experience most conflict with their parents; high levels of parent–adolescent conflict has been consistently shown around ages 15 and 16 in a meta-analysis in all four types of dyads—mother–son, mother–daughter, father–son, and father–daughter (Laursen et al., 1998). Further, emerging adults—from age 18 to age 29 (Arnett, 2014)—explore love in more intimate and serious ways than during adolescence (Arnett, 2000). Dating in emerging adulthood tends to be more exclusive than in adolescence, and emerging adulthood is a developmentally vulnerable period for romantic relationships (Arnett, 2000; Arnett & Fishel, 2013). Thus, the beginning of the emerging adulthood may be a good time to examine their attachment. As high levels of pIPV manifest in young adulthood (Caetano et al., 2005), later in emerging adulthood may serve as a good time to investigate their pIPV.

Current Study

Despite the aforementioned reasoning, previous research hardly tested PPC as an antecedent of pIPV and no study tested whether insecure attachment mediates PPC’s prediction of pIPV to our best knowledge. Finding antecedents of pIPV (which are less known and tested so far) can guide prevention and intervention efforts to prevent and reduce pIPV. Therefore, we test whether PPC perceived at age 16 predicts insecure attachment with romantic partners at age 18 (a path) and whether insecure attachment at age 18 predicts pIPV at age 24 (b path). Although not our main concern (the indirect path), we investigate if PPC directly predicts pIPV. If the direct path between PPC and pIPV would not be found, we will still test the indirect path (a and b paths) since the indirect path is our main focus and Hayes (2017) clarified that mediation analyses are possible when a direct path (c path in mediation) does not exist.

Between attachment anxiety and avoidance, we will test which mediator most consistently mediates the relationship between PPC and pIPV. We will examine whether tolerating unpredictability and lack of responses from significant others (attachment anxiety) or discomfort around them (avoidance) more consistently predicts pIPV. Moreover, we evaluate whether the hypothesized paths differ by either parent’s gender or the participants’ own gender. We first theoretically reasoned that PPC in adolescence, attachment in the beginning of emerging adulthood, and pIPV later in the emerging adulthood would be good developmental periods to test their associations, as the aforementioned reasoning. Then we chose the ages of the measures fitting our conceptual framework described earlier from the Child Development Project (Dodge et al., 1990) longitudinal data. PPC data are available at age 16, and attachment was examined at the beginning of emerging adulthood (age 18); the first age when the attachment measure was administered is age 18. The last age when the pIPV measure was administered is age 24. The six years from age 18 to the middle of emerging adulthood can provide enough time to capture development in their romantic relationships. Therefore, we examine PPC perceived at age 16, attachment at age 18, and pIPV at age 24.

Method

Analytic Sample

Data were drawn from the Child Development Project (Dodge et al., 1990), and the studies were approved by the institutional review boards at Auburn, Duke, and Indiana Universities. The data description can be found in Choe et al. (2019). Because only those who had a romantic partner at age 24 could answer the pIPV questionnaire, we chose the participants who answered the pIPV measures at age 24 for further analyses. In addition, to examine fathers’ roles, we wanted to compare mPC models with pPC models. Ergo we picked the participants who answered about both their mother and father at age 16. Taken together, this analytic sample consists of 221 participants: 91 male and 130 female, predominantly white (203 white, 17 black, and 1 others), and parents mostly married (183 either parent married, 33 single parents, 5 others). In addition, socioeconomic status (SES) is a composite measure from 8 to 66, measured by a combination of the parents’ years of education and occupation (Dodge et al., 1994). This analytic sample’s SES statistics include M = 42.31 and SD = 13.59.

Measures

We calculated means across the items for the following measures, except for pIPV.

PPC at age 16. Barber (1996)’s Psychological Control Scale—Youth Report was used and 11 items were administered. Adolescents answered the same questions about their mother and father separately, and the items were answered on a 3-point Likert scale: 1 = not at all like him/her, 2 = somewhat like him/her, and 3 = a lot like him/her. Cronbach’s alphas are 0.86 for mother and 0.83 for father.

Attachment: Shortened relationships style questionnaire at age 18. Attachment anxiety and avoidance items were adopted from a well-validated attachment measure: Collins and Read (1990). The measure comprises 18 items: 11 items for anxiety (e.g., I often worry that romantic partners do not really love me) and 7 items for avoidance (e.g., I find it difficult to depend on other people). This scale was answered on a 5-point scale: 1 = not at all like, 3 = somewhat like me, and 5 = very much like me. Cronbach’s alphas are 0.87 for anxiety and 0.70 for avoidance.

pIPV: Conflict Tactics Scale at age 24. Psychological aggression in the revised Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus et al., 1996) includes seven items such as “I yelled or insulted or swore” and “I threatened to hit or throw something.” The question was asked at the top: How often did this happen? Then the behaviors were listed as items. Answer options were: 1 = Once in the past year, 2 = Twice in the past year, 4 = 3–5 times in the past year, 8 = 6–10 times in the past year, 15 = 11–20 times in the past year, 20+ = More than 20 times in the past year, P = Not in the past year, but it did happen before, and 0 = This has never happened. Cronbach’s alpha is 0.77. Because pIPV is extremely positively skewed (showing mostly 0), and the items describe different behaviors, we dichotomized each item—1 for frequencies more than zero and 0 for zero, and then we summed the dichotomized items. We used the number of individual behaviors within that category that were reported at least once as a composite variable.

Covariates. We controlled for SES. Ideally, we would like to control for the outcome and mediator earlier than our predictor (age 16) with the same measures. However, the same measures were not administered, neither for pIPV nor for attachment, at earlier ages than the years used here. Ergo we are not able to control for the outcome and mediator earlier than the predictor.

Analytic Plan

The models contain an indirect path and a direct path as Figures 1 and 2 show. Perceived mPC and pPC were entered into models individually to examine mothers and fathers’ roles separately. The indirect paths include a path in mediation from perceived PPC at age 16 (mPC and pPC separately) to attachment at age 18 (anxiety and avoidance separately) and b path from attachment anxiety or avoidance at age 18 to pIPV at age 24. The direct path tests if PPC predicts pIPV directly. The control variable was entered to predict all of the measures. Then we put attachment anxiety and avoidance into the models together to test which one works as a more consistent mediator. Since anxiety and avoidance share variance, putting both together in the same models will show the unique contribution of either anxiety or avoidance on pIPV.

Further, we adopted multiple group analyses (Jöreskog, 1971) within each mPC and pPC model to test whether a difference emerges based on the gender of the adolescents. Because we want to know which path differs by the gender of the adolescents, we tested all the paths in all of our path models. We first constrained one parameter for the path being tested to be the same between female and male subjects and then allowed the other parameters to be freely estimated between the two genders. Then we performed chi-square differences to inspect whether there is a significant difference between the two models.

We implemented path models in MPlus (Version 8.3; Muthén & Muthén, 1988). The outcome pIPV was fit to the negative binomial distribution. The bootstrap method was adopted to deal with skewness of the outcome and the saturated models; 4,000 iterations were performed based on the recommendation of Dr Todd D. Little (personal communication on 10/1/2019). Fit measures were not generated due to completely saturated models (perfectly fitting models). Missing data was dealt with using the full information maximum likelihood (FIML) method, which is a recommended way of handling missingness (Enders, 2010). To ensure that FIML is possible to use for the missingness pattern of the data set (Little, 2013), we tested if data are missing completely at random (MCAR) by performing the Little’s MCAR test using BaylorEdPsych package (Beaujean, 2012) in R.

We used R (R Core Team, 2020) software for all the analyses except for the path analyses: the psych package (Revelle, 2018) for descriptive statistics and correlation analyses, the CTT package (Willse, 2018) for reliability analysis, and the MplusAutomation (Hallquist & Wiley, 2018) package to convert data files for the path analyses in MPlus. We performed t-test to inspect whether a difference exists between the two cohorts. We did not test differences by race due to the predominantly White sample.

Results

Tables 1 shows descriptive statistics. Perceived PPC at age 16 and pIPV at age 24 are positively skewed while attachment anxiety and avoidance at age 18 seem normally distributed. Moreover, we did not find any significant difference by cohorts in the mean level of any variables we used for the path models. Further, Little’s MCAR test shows that this analytic sample is MCAR: chi-squared = 11.43, DF = 22, and a p-value = .97. Table 2 reports correlation matrices; all measures are positively correlated, and attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance are highly positively correlated.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

	N	Mean	SD	SE	Median	Min	Max	Skewness	Kurtosis
Perceived mPC 16	221	1.47	0.44	0.03	1.36	1	3	1.29	1.18
Perceived pPC 16	221	1.40	0.36	0.02	1.27	1	2.73	1.14	0.95
Attachment Anxiety 18	207	1.73	0.64	0.04	1.55	1	3.82	1.12	0.91
Attachment Avoidance 18	207	2.48	0.72	0.05	2.43	1	5	0.71	0.60
Psychological Aggression 24*	221	2.36	1.70	0.11	2	0	7	0.38	–0.47
SES	216	42.31	13.9	0.95	42	8	66	–0.16	–0.80

Note. *—sum of dichotomized items.

Table 2.

Correlation.

	mPC16	pPC16	Anx18	Av18	PA24	SES
Perceived mPC 16	1	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Perceived pPC 16	0.40^a	1	NA	NA	NA	NA
Attachment Anxiety 18	0.26^b	0.27^a	1	NA	NA	NA
Attachment Avoidance 18	0.32^a	0.16^d	0.48^a	1	NA	NA
Psychological Aggression 24*	0.09	0.04	0.18^c	0.15^d	1	NA
SES	0	–0.06	–0.05	0.02	–0.11	1

Notes. p: a.0001. b.001. c.01. d.05.

*= sum of dichotomized items.

To check the significance of each path, 95% Confidence Intervals (CIs) from the bootstrap method were used: the CIs came from the bootstrap with 4,000 iterations . All of the indirect paths we tested are significant. Figure 1 shows the results for the mPC models, and Figure 2 shows the pPC models. When attachment anxiety and avoidance were entered into the models together, only the path through anxiety remains significant in the mPC model. In the pPC model, neither path with anxiety nor avoidance remain significant. Both mPC and pPC models with anxiety at age 18 are significant. These results show that the hypothesized paths exist regardless of the gender of the parents. Most paths do not differ by gender, except for the path from perceived pPC to avoidance: Chi-square differences 4.83^d (p: ^a .0001 ^b .001 ^c .01 ^d .05). Males reported more avoidance at age 18 than female subjects when they noticed pPC at age 16.

Figure 1.

Notes. p: a.0001. b.001. c.01. d.05.

Figure 2.

Notes. p: a.0001. b.001. c.01. d.05.

Discussion

Our results reveal that PPC perceived at age 16 predicts insecure attachment at age 18 (attachment anxiety and avoidance respectively), which then predicts pIPV at age 24. In addition, attachment anxiety mediates this relationship between perceived PPC at age 16 and pIPV at age 24 more consistently than attachment avoidance. Further, these path models are significant regardless of the gender of the parents or adolescents. Lastly, neither mPC nor pPC perceived by adolescents at age 16 directly predicts pIPV at age 24.

Our results support our hypothesis that insecure attachment serves as a mechanism through which PPC interferes with romantic relationships with the outcome pIPV. Parents may think that they are restricting autonomy from their adolescents via PPC, but our results insinuate that perhaps PPC may influence romantic relationships in their emerging adulthood: feeling that their romantic partners will not respond to their needs (attachment anxiety), and they are not comfortable to be around their partners (attachment avoidance). Then they reported at age 24 that they yelled at their romantic partners, stomped out of the room, insulted them, and broke things that belonged to their romantic partners, which can be construed as attempts to gain felt security (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1969). As previous research specifies that people act aggressively when their goals are obstructed (Choe & Min, 2011), because psychologically controlled children’s aim for felt security was not achieved via PPC, they may try to obtain it from their romantic partners while engaging in pIPV behaviors. Our results also call for future research inspecting intergenerational attachment and PPC: whether insecurely attached parents adopt PPC and create a vicious cycle. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first papers to suggest a link between PPC and pIPV via insecure attachment and present results buttressing the proposal.

Between attachment anxiety and avoidance, the paths with anxiety at age 18 are most consistently significant; when both were entered to the same models altogether, most paths with attachment anxiety at age 18 remain significant while those with attachment avoidance do not. Our results add to the previous literature that attachment anxiety predicts negative developmental outcomes more than attachment avoidance (Dutton & White, 2012; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) rather than the other way around (Lawson & Malnar, 2011). It may be related to predictability and uncertainty that attachment anxiety and avoidance promote differently. Attachment anxiety entails lack of predictability and high uncertainty. Individuals with the anxious attachment style do not know if or when their romantic partner will respond to their needs, and this uncertainty may facilitate pIPV by acting out abruptly. However, individuals with the avoidant attachment style may experience less uncertainty because they themselves can create distance between themselves and their partners to prevent their discomfort, rather than lashing out. Therefore, individuals with the anxious attachment style may more often act impulsively and present pIPV than individuals with the avoidant attachment style.

Perceived fathering and mothering rarely showed a difference; paths in the pPC models as well as mPC models remain significant. Our results add to the previous literature that showed PPC’s universally negative impacts on personality and emotional development of children, adolescents, and emerging adults (Barber et al., 2012; Choe et al., 2019; Choe & Read, 2019; Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010). Moreover, our current work is one of the few papers that reported perceived pPC’s association with adolescent personality and emotional development separately from mPC, and our results suggest pPC matters as well as mPC in the development of attachment and pIPV of emerging adults. In addition, our results are consistent with an emerging body of literature, highlighting the importance of fathers in children’s personality development (e.g., Cabrera et al., 2018). Further, our results call for more research on pPC.

The gender of the adolescent rarely affected the path models. The multiple group analyses and chi-square difference tests revealed almost no significant difference between genders on all the paths we tested. The negligible gender differences for adolescents suggest that PPC is detrimental to any adolescent regardless of their gender. It does not matter which gender adolescent perceives PPC, it matters that adolescents experience PPC.

Further, perceived PPC—either mPC or pPC—at age 16 did not directly predict pIPV in all models. Rather, perceived PPC at age 16 predicts insecure attachment at age 18, which then predicts pIPV at age 24. This nonsignificant path between perceived PPC and pIPV suggests that the social learning theory of aggression (Bandura, 1978) might not explain pIPV from PPC; if adolescents imitate aggression from their parents by observing PPC, a significant direct path between perceived PPC and pIPV should have been found. Hence our results do not support the adoption of social learning theory (Bandura, 1978) to explain pIPV from PPC. However, lack of the significant direct path does not diminish our findings for numerous reasons. First, we found the indirect effect by insecure attachment, which our main hypotheses involve. Also, Hayes (2017) maintained that indirect effects remain intact when the direct effect is not significant.

Limitations and Future Directions

Our study comes with some weaknesses that only future research that does not rely on secondary data analyses can address. The usage of self-report measures may pose some questions: whether participants reported the measures correctly about themselves (e.g., whether the participants who reported the avoidant attachment style are really avoidant). For this reason, attachment literature has recommended attachment interviews rather than self-reports (Crowell et al., 1996; Shmueli-Goetz et al., 2008). Other methods such as observation, interviews, and narratives can provide richer data, and future research with diverse methods other than self-reports can confirm our findings.

In addition, the duration of the relationship for which the pIPV measure was answered was not known, which might have affected how many pIPV behaviors the participants reported. Participants with longer romantic relationships would likely report higher numbers of pPIV behaviors. Then the outcome may not represent only the degree to which participants are psychologically violent toward their romantic partners. Hence a replication study controlling for the length of the romantic relationship is needed.

Further, since the sample is predominantly White, more research with diverse samples is needed to test our models and confirm our results. The current results (with a mainly White sample) do not reveal whether or not PPC perceived in adolescence predicts insecure attachment in early emerging adulthood and then pIPV in later emerging adulthood in other ethnic groups. Models with other ethnic samples may show different results, and factors specific to the ethnic samples such as cultural orientation (e.g., collectivism vs individualism) may play a role in the proposed associations among PPC, insecure attachment, and pIPV. Therefore, more research with diverse ethnic samples (such as Latinx, Asian, and African samples) can contribute to the literature.

Since we analyzed an existing data set with sporadically measured variables, the outcome and mediator at earlier ages are not available for us to control for. It is a major issue since adding earlier controls in the mediational path models can change the results. However, repeated measures of pIPV from age 16 to age 24 would be a practical concern as well because recruiting participants who have romantic partners at all time points (particularly starting as early as 16) will substantially reduce the number of data points. Since the participants need to have a romantic partner at all time points—from age 16 to age 24—to answer the questionnaires, if the original researchers who designed the study were to collect data on pIPV at age 16 or earlier as well, the analytic sample would not have included many subjects. Future research with a study design specifically for pIPV measures with a larger sample can address this issue. Moreover, because attachment with their parents was not measured, we could not test if adolescents transfer the bonds with their parents to their romantic partners in their emerging adulthood. Without attachment with their parents, the current results may pose a question regarding the role of PPC: does PPC indeed predict insecure attachment with their parents and romantic partners or does adolescent insecure attachment with their parents mainly predict their later insecure attachment with their romantic partners? Further analyses with attachment with one’s parents along with PPC, attachment with romantic partners, and pIPV can buttress our findings.

Conclusion and Implications

Our findings show consistently significant results with insecure attachment at age 18 as a mechanism that connects PPC perceived at age 16 and pIPV at age 24. This provides an important cornerstone for future research and our findings illuminate PPC as another antecedent of pIPV. Our findings can contribute to science, the practice of parenting, and policymaking. First, our results fill the gap in the previous research regarding perceived PPC, insecure attachment, and pIPV. Moreover, preventions for pIPV can consider parent education to stop PPC, and parents can focus on facilitating secure attachment, rather than adopting PPC to control their children’s minds and behaviors. Further, interventions for PPC can focus on restoring felt security to counteract the insecure attachment that PPC promotes. Finally, policymakers can support research and public services to foster secure attachment in families with PPC to reduce and prevent pIPV behaviors in adolescence and emerging adulthood.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We thank the Child Development Project—Drs Kenneth Dodge, Gregory Pettit, and John Bates—for giving us access to their longitudinal data. We also thank Dr Jennifer Lansford for answering our questions about the data set.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The Child Development Project received financial support by the National Institute of Mental Health [MH42498, MH56961, MH57024, and MH57095]; the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [HD30572]; the National Institute on Drug Abuse [DA016903].

ORCID iD

So Young Choe

Jungeun Olivia Lee

Author Contribution

The manuscript has been seen and reviewed by all authors. So Young Choe conceived this idea to test, analyzed the data, and wrote the draft. Jungeun Olivia Lee advised on the data analyses and developmental framework. Stephen J. Read worked on the theoretical framework and the writing of the article.

Author Biographies

So Young Choe, PhD, is an assistant research psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of California Riverside. Her research interests and expertise lie in parental psychological control (PPC), especially the mechanisms through which PPC impairs adolescents’ emotional and personality development and the conceptualization and measurement of PPC. She is interested in diverse quantitative and qualitative methods such as narratives, interviews, and longitudinal data analyses.

Jungeun Olivia Lee, PhD, MSW, is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She seeks to disentangle a complex relationship among socioeconomic status, adverse childhood experiences, and behavior health, particularly substance use and its comorbid mental health, during the life course and across generations. She also interested in quantitative methodology for longitudinal data.

Stephen J. Read, PhD, is the Mendel B. Silberberg professor of Social Psychology at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on understanding the role of personality and motivation in human social behavior. He is particularly interested in using neuroimaging and computational models to investigate the influence of motivation on everyday decision-making.

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