Linking Parenting Styles and Socio-Emotional Learning of Adolescents: A Critical Review

Abstract

Adolescence is a formative period in which socio-emotional competencies consolidate under the joint influence of biological maturation, peer relationships, and family socialisation. Parenting style, understood as the enduring emotional climate within which specific caregiving practices unfold, has long been regarded as a central determinant of how adolescents learn to recognise, regulate, and express emotion, and how they build the social skills that underpin healthy functioning. This review synthesises contemporary peer-reviewed evidence on the relationship between parenting styles and adolescents' socio-emotional learning, drawing on theoretical models from developmental psychology together with the applied framework advanced by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. It traces how authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting patterns differentially shape emotion regulation, self-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making across adolescence, and examines the mediating roles of attachment security, basic psychological need satisfaction, and parental psychological control. Cultural, socioeconomic, and gender-related moderators are considered, alongside the growing influence of digital parenting practices on adolescents' emotional development. The review also considers how school-based socio-emotional learning programmes might be more effectively aligned with family-level intervention. The evidence converges on the conclusion that warmth combined with structured, autonomy-supportive guidance offers the most consistent developmental advantage, although the strength and even the direction of these associations vary meaningfully across cultural and socioeconomic contexts, and some strands of evidence — including on digital parental mediation and on the link between socioeconomic status and parenting style — remain inconsistent or null. The review closes by identifying priorities for future longitudinal and cross-cultural research and by outlining the methodological limitations of the current evidence base.