Parental practices and depressive symptoms in adolescents

The objective of this study was to analyze the predictive power that parental practices have in adolescents' depressive symptomatology considering children's and parents' gender. A non-probabilistic sample was used, consisting of 1934 adolescents, from three different cities from the Mexican Republic (26.5% from Mexico City, 26.7% from Poza Rica, Veracruz, and 46.8% from Culiacan, Sinaloa). 51.4% were males and 48.6% were females, with an age range from 11 to 17 years old, and a mean of 13.3 years old. Nine dimensions of parental practices were evaluated, five for the mother: Communication, Autonomy, Imposition, Psychological control, and Behavioral control; and four dimensions for the father: Communication/Behavioral control, Autonomy, Imposition, and Psychological control. To evaluate the depressive symptomatology, a revised and adapted for Mexican population version of the Scale of Depression of the Epidemiologic Studies Center (CES-D-R) was used. The results showed that women obtained higher scores in depressive symtomatology than men. Depressive symptomatology was associated in a positive way to psychological control and imposition, in both parents, and in a negative way with communication, autonomy and behavioral control, both maternal and paternal. Linear regression analyses were done to determine the effect of parental practices in the depressive symptomatology, which were conducted by gender and by city. In general, the results showed that women had a higher percentage of explained variance (from 26% to 31%) than men (from 6% to 25%) and the dimension that explained the higher variance in most of the groups was maternal psychological control, except on men from Mexico City and Culiacan.