The Impact of Enmeshed Parenting Styles on Young Adults from Collectivist Cultures

Research has found parental enmeshment contributes to the stress of university students, although that finding may be cultural and hold only for individualistic North American families, but not for more collectivistic North American families. Enmeshment is the degree to which a student experiences the parents as providing highly intrusive attention and involvement in their activities. Enmeshment is a factor, which exacerbates the association between daily hassles that students experience with depressive experiences. The primary objective of this study was to determine whether the impact of enmeshed parental styles differs according to the individualistic (idiocentric) versus the collectivist (allocentric) cultural background of university students. Student respondents from various Asian, African, North American and European backgrounds comprised a total sample of N=222. Respondents completed questionnaires on SurveyMonkey. Specifically, an enmeshment measure was created to capture an endorsed sense of supportive enmeshed parenting. Multiple regressions were conducted in SPSS to reveal any interaction effects indicating a moderation between hassles and depression. The findings indicate that the positive impact of enmeshment for the students from the allocentric families is amplified when the students see their parents as working well as a unit. Enmeshment and complementary equality at high levels have a significant interaction effect providing a buffer for students from both cultures from depression associated with daily hassles, however, while support is a moderator for the individualist group, it produced opposite effects for the collectivist group. The discussion draws attention to recognizing culture as a contextual factor with which to better understand the impact of parenting styles.