Understanding the Link Between Anxious Parental Overprotection and Academic Confidence in Emerging Adults: Mediation through Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Processes

Some parents may engage in overparenting, often characterized as overprotection, to ensure their college student’s academic success, yet, findings show that such parental efforts undermine performance. In the present study, we propose that there are interpersonal (parental hostility) and intrapersonal factors (depression and self-regulation) that act as mechanisms through which anxious overprotective parenting leads to diminished emerging adult academic confidence. Emerging adults ( N = 967; 75.6% women; M age = 18.71, SD = .94) who were primarily in their first (60.5%) or second (35.7%) year of college completed measures of academic confidence (academic adjustment, academic efficacy, confidence in graduating), reports of mothers’ and fathers’ anxious overprotective parenting, perceptions of maternal and paternal hostility, depression, and self-regulation. Employing a double mediation structural equation model, results revealed that anxious maternal and paternal overprotective parenting operated through perceived parental hostility to intrapersonal processes (depression, self-regulation) in predicting academic confidence. Maternal and paternal hostility, in particular, was paramount as an interpersonal mediator through which overprotective parenting led to emerging adult intrapersonal and academic outcomes. Although cross-sectional, the current findings are suggestive of the developmental cascade model (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010), whereby diminished family dynamics are associated with internalizing symptoms and self-regulatory issues, which, in turn, are linked with lower academic achievement in children.