Predictors of parents' ability to set limits on children: Marital quality, parents' schemas, and perceptions of their own parents' attitudes

Limit setting is an essential part of parenting practices and a crucial predictor of children's social, academic, physical, and psychological outcomes from childhood to adulthood. This thesis aimed to explore the possible factors that might predict parents' limit setting. Those factors are demographic information (gender, education level, income, marriage age, number of children, and marriage type) parents' perception of their parent's parenting practices, parent's schemas, and marriage quality. The data were collected from 64 mothers and 60 fathers who have at least one children whose ages are between 3 to 10. The measurements were Demographic Information Form, Turkish Young Parenting Inventory, Turkish Young Schema Inventory-Short Form 3, Marital Quality Scale, and Vignettes. To analyze results, descriptive analysis, correlations, linear regressions, and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted. The results showed that education level, over permissive and abusive parenting, quarreling in marriage, and disconnection schema have a statistically significant relationship to predicting parents' limit setting skills. The education level positively predicts effective limit-setting skills. However, abuse, over permissiveness, disconnection, and quarreling negatively predict effective limit-setting skills. Moreover, the hierarchical regression for education level, parents' perception of their parents' parenting practices, their schema domains, and marriage quality explained 26% of parents' limit setting skills. The discussion, clinical contribution of this study, future suggestions for research, and limitations were discussed.