Between Rock and a Hard Place: Internal and External Psychological Control and Preschoolers' Social-Emotional Adjustment

Although parental psychological control has been found to be detrimental to children's psychological functioning, less is known about the role of internal and external maternal and paternal psychological control in preschoolers' socio-emotional development. In this cross-sectional, multi-informant study, we rely on the self-determination theory to examine the relations between internal (i.e., guilt induction) and external (i.e., constraining verbal expressions and erratic emotional behavior) mother-reported and father-reported psychological control and preschoolers' (N = 136; 51.5% males; Mage = 5.53, SD = 0.66 years) externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, and social competence, as reported by their teachers. Regression analyses revealed unique relations between internal and external psychological control and preschoolers' social-emotional adjustment. While external psychological control related negatively to preschoolers' social competence and positively to anger-aggression, internal psychological control emerged as the unique predictor of anxiety-withdrawal. Importantly, the results indicated that these findings were consistent for both mothers and fathers. Our findings suggest that parental internal and external psychological control differentially relate to children's socio-emotional adjustment in early childhood. This study distinguished between internal and external parental psychological control and examined their unique relations with preschoolers' socio-emotional adjustment.Maternal and paternal internal and external psychological control differed in their relations with children's socio-emotional functioning.The present findings add to recent research drawing attention to the need for investigating parental psychological control in a multidimensional fashion.