A longitudinal study on relationships among perceived parenting style, psychological well-being, and sleep in junior high school students

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigated 1) the association between perceived parental control and students’ overall psychological well-being and sleep; 2) how negative cognition played a role in mediating the relation between parental control and psychological well-being among junior high school students. A total of 490 students from three different schools participated in the study. One of the schools (128 students) only joined the data collection in time 1, and the rest of the data from the other two schools were matched across three time-point for data analysis. Current results revealed that maternal control showed significant association with anxiety. Results of path analysis suggested that anxiety predicted cognitive errors, fully mediated by psychological and social well-being. Anxiety also predicted sleep quality, but the effect decreased after controlling the cognitive errors which acted as the mediator in the model. The findings implied the importance to promote psychoeducation to parents on the awareness of parental control and to educate students’ awareness of negative thoughts which could greatly affect their sleep quality.