In plain language
Teenagers experience high rates of mental health problems, yet most are reluctant to see a professional. Parents are usually involved at every step when a young person does get help — noticing the problem, finding a service, getting them to appointments. This study asked whether the way parents parent matters: does an “authoritative” style (warm and responsive, but with clear expectations) and strong parental support make teens more willing to seek professional help?
The researchers surveyed 1,582 Australian students aged 16–18 across 17 schools, measuring parental authoritativeness, parental social support, psychological distress, and intentions to seek help. A year later, 1,032 of the students reported whether they had actually sought help for a mental health problem.
Teens who rated their parents as more authoritative and more emotionally supportive reported stronger intentions to seek professional help, even after accounting for gender and how distressed they were. However, neither parenting variable predicted whether teens actually sought help one year later — possibly because only about 18% of the sample sought help at all, making actual help seeking hard to predict. The study suggests parents can shape teens’ openness to getting help, while showing that turning intentions into action involves other factors that still need research.
Key findings
- Parental authoritativeness and parental social support were each uniquely associated with greater intentions to seek professional help, even when gender and psychological distress were controlled.
- Parental authoritativeness and psychological distress were slightly stronger predictors of help-seeking intentions than parental social support when all variables were modeled together.
- Neither parental authoritativeness nor parental support measured at baseline predicted actual help seeking assessed one year later.
- Actual help seeking over the following year was relatively uncommon (about 18% of adolescents), which may partly explain why it was hard to predict.
- Higher parental authoritativeness and support were associated with lower psychological distress (r = −.23 and −.35 respectively).
- The sample was large and longitudinal: 1,582 students (49% female, mean age 17.7) in 17 schools, with 1,032 providing complete data across two time points one year apart.
How to cite
APA
Maiuolo, M., Deane, F. P., & Ciarrochi, J. (2019). Parental authoritativeness, social support and help-seeking for mental health problems in adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(6), 1056–1067. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-00994-4
BibTeX
@article{maiuolo2019parental,
title = {Parental authoritativeness, social support and help-seeking for mental health problems in adolescents},
author = {Maiuolo, Michelle and Deane, Frank P. and Ciarrochi, Joseph},
journal = {Journal of Youth and Adolescence},
year = {2019},
volume = {48},
number = {6},
pages = {1056--1067},
doi = {10.1007/s10964-019-00994-4}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.