The purpose of this study was elucidating the effective parenting style to raise children’s resilience.
Our participants were 284 Japanese young adults (137 males and 147 females, 18-27 years old). Participants assessed the relationship with their parents and their resilience using well-validated Japanese questionnaires. We classified parent-child relationship into 4 clusters (Cluster1: strict but warm, Cluster2: just warm, Cluster3: neither too close to nor too distant, Cluster4: less attachment) using k-means clustering analysis. The difference of participants’ resilience among these clusters was examined by one-way ANOVA.
As a result, there were significant differences of resilience among 4 clusters across the all parent-child pairs (mother & son; F=7.84, p<0.001, father & son; F=8.96, p<0.001, mother & daughter; F=6.12, p<0.001, father & daughter; F=5.20, p=0.002). Multiple comparison with Bonferroni method revealed that females with Cluster1 mother showed higher resilience than females with Cluster4 mother (p=0.001), and males with Cluster1 father showed higher resilience than males with Cluster4 father (p<0.001). Also, females with Cluster2 father showed higher resilience than females with Cluster4 father (p=0.005), and males with Cluster2 mother showed higher resilience than males with Cluster3 mother (p=0.003).
This is the first study demonstrated the difference of resilience among variations of normal parenting.