The relations between parenting styles, autonomy and creativity in adolescents

The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship among parenting styles, autonomy, and creativity in adolesecents and the mediating role of flexibility and persistence between autonomy and creativity. The population of this research included freshment students enrolled in Health Vocational School at Abant Izzet Baysal University and students in Bolu Anadolu High School. The sample consisted of a total of 266 adolescents, 34.6 % male and 65.4 % female, whose age ranged form 14 years to 22 years old. In this study, 'Measure of Child Rearing Styles (MCRS) developed by Sümer and Güngör (1999) to identify the perceived parenting styles of adolescents' father and mother, 'Adolescent Autonomy Scale developed by Noom and his collegues (2001) and adapted to Turkish by Musaağaoğlu and Gure (2005) to identify autonomy level of adolescents, and 'Creativity Form' which contained uses for some objects were used as instruments for assessing data. Data were analyzed by a means of correlation among parenting styles, behavioral autonomy, emotional autonomy, and creativity, one-way ANOVA, and mediatonal analysis for flexibility and persistence between autonomy and creativity. This study also investigated whether or not autonomy given to adolescents increase creativity. Adolescents were divided into two parts; experimental and control groups. Before the experiment, typing speed, and moods of participants were evaluated. Then, they were exposed to five different pictures of objects and asked to choose one as to generate many uses for this chosen object as they could do. In contrast, the participants in the control condition had no option to choose any object but were asked to generate uses for the determined object by the experimenter. In this study creativity was assessed by calculating uses for object(s), autonomy was manipulated by instructing the participants to choose either an object that they desired or an object determined by the experimenter. Flexibility was calculated by the number of various categories that they uniquely scanned and persistence by dividing the number of unique ideas into flexibility. Differences in creativity scores were analyzed according to the presence or absence of autonomy. In this study, it was found that permissive/indulgent parenting style and permissive/neglectful parenting style were positively correlated with behavioral autonomy; on the other hand, authoritative style was correlated positively with emotional autonomy. While there were no significant relationships between parenting style and creativity, adolescents given autonomy were more creative than adolescents without autonomy. Moreover, mediator analyses showed that flexibility and persistence played mediator roles for the relationships between autonomy and creativity. Key words: Adolescence, Flexibility, Persistence, Autonomy, Creativity