How perception of parents shapes psychological well-being beyond parentification

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between parentification experiences, individual's perceptions of their parents, and psychological well-being in a young adult sample. Data were collected from a total of 204 participants aged 18–25. Data were obtained using standard self-report scales measuring psychological well-being, emotional, instrumental, and perceived fairness, and parenting behaviors as perceived involvement, autonomy support, and warmth taken from parents. As a result of the analyses, it was found that the emotional and instrumental parentification significantly and negatively predicted psychological well-being. In addition, the perception of fairness in parentification stood out as the strongest negative predictor of psychological well-being in the study. In the hierarchical regression analysis, time spent with parents, parents presence at home, parentification, and perceived parenting behaviors were added to the model, respectively, and the previous variables were controlled at each stage. In the first stage of the hierarchical regression analysis, the family presence at home and the time spent with parents were added to the model. In the second stage, parentification scores were added to the model and the explained variance in psychological well-being increased significantly with this addition. This clearly demonstrates the effect of parentification on the individual's psychological well-being. In the third stage, father's parenting characteristics (involvement, warmth, autonomy support) were added to the model, a statistically significant increase was observed in the total explained variance, but the individual contributions of these variables were not found to be significant. In the fourth stage, mother parenting characteristics added to the model increased the explanatory power to a small extent but did not provide a significant individual contribution. Findings were discussed within the context of the relevant literature. Keywords: parentification, psychological well-being, perception of parents, young adulthood