1. Introduction
Internalization of social values, which refers to the assumption that society is one’s own so that socially acceptable behavior is motivated by internal rather than external factors, is one of the main objectives of parental socialization (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994) [
1] (p. 4), and has been identified by earlier scholars as the key to raise well-developed children [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6]. It has also been noted that the specific parenting practices used be parents differentially affect children’s internalization of values [
1,
5,
7].
Swarchtz values theory has recently identified conservation and self-transcendence values as social focused values [
8], since these values are centered on consideration for others and acceptance of social norms [
5]. Self-transcendence values express concern for the welfare and interests of others and include two types of values: universalism and benevolence [
9,
10,
11,
12]. Universalism is described as “understanding, and protection for the welfare of all and the environment” [
11] (p. 4), whereas benevolence is described as “preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact” [
11] (p. 4). Conservation values refer to the respect, commitment and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide the self [
9,
11]. Conservation values include three types of value priorities: Security, conformity and tradition [
8,
10,
13]. Security values are described as “search of safety, harmony and stability of society, of relationships, and of self” [
11] (p. 3); conformity values refer to “restraint of actions likely to upset others and violate social expectations or norms” [
11] (p. 3); and tradition values are described as “respect, commitment and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide the self” [
11] (p. 4). Self-transcendence and conservation have previously used to measure social values internalization [
5,
6,
14,
15], following Grusec and Goodnow’s (1994) [
1] (p. 4) suggestion of measure internalization in terms of prosocial behavior consideration for the feelings or needs of others—and moral standards—assessed, for instance, by resistance to temptation, reparation after deviation, evidence of guilt, and level of moral reasoning.
Despite the importance of the social focus in the socialization process, the individual focus is also essential in parental socialization. In this sense, self-esteem is also considered a main goal of parental socialization, being a classical criterion of adolescents’ internal well-being in parenting studies. Self-esteem, as the person’s perception of himself, has been considered key in understanding behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social functioning [
16]. Research has shown that self-esteem is related to a wide range of both psychological and behavioral criteria [
17,
18,
19]. Finally, in the same way that values internalization, self-esteem has been proven to be differentially influenced by parental styles [
20,
21,
22,
23].
Research on parental socialization have traditionally considered two main independent dimensions to capture parenting styles. These two dimensions have been identified as parental warmth and parental strictness [
24,
25,
26,
27], although other different labels with similar meanings have been used [
28,
29]. The strictness dimension refers to the extent to which parents use control and supervision, establish norms for children’s behavior, and maintain position of authority [
24,
30,
31]. Demandingness, control or firmness are some of the labels that also have been used to identify strictness dimension [
24,
26,
32]. The warmth dimension represents the extent to which the parents show the children love and affection, give them their support, talk and reason with them [
6,
27,
33]. The warmth dimension has been labeled as responsiveness, involvement, acceptance or implication [
24,
30,
34]. Based on the use that parents do of the practices that define these two dimensions, four parenting styles are identified: authoritative parenting (characterized by the use of warmth and strictness), authoritarian parenting (mainly characterized by the use of strictness), indulgent parenting (mainly characterized by the use of warmth) and neglectful parenting (characterized by the lack of both warmth and strictness).
In relation to the four parenting styles and their effects on adolescent behavioral and psychological adjustment, finding out which is the optimal socialization style (i.e., authoritative, indulgent, authoritarian or neglectful) that parents should use has been the main goal of parenting studies [
24]. Recent studies (see Garcia, Serra, Garcia, Martinez, & Cruise, 2019) [
35] have proposed a paradigm of three different historical stages for optimal parental style. This new paradigm highlights that over the past century, based on numerous studies mainly carried in the United States, scholars as Baumrind [
3,
36,
37,
38] or Steinberg and colleagues [
39,
40,
41,
42] have pointed out authoritative parenting as the optimal parenting style (i.e., second stage) [
35]. Authoritarian parenting (i.e., first stage) [
35] was considered optimal at the beginning of the century by scholars such as Watson, (1928) [
43], and has shown benefits among some ethnic minorities such as Asian–Americans [
44,
45], African Americans [
46,
47] or Arab families [
48,
49,
50]. Finally, in the current digital era, emergent research has begun to point to indulgent parenting as the optimal style (i.e., third stage) [
35]. Studies carried out in different cultural contexts have begun to show that indulgent parenting (characterized by the use of warmth but not parental strictness) leads to the same or higher offspring’s personal and social adjustment than authoritative parenting (characterized by the use of warmth and also by parental strictness) [
35,
51,
52,
53,
54,
55,
56]. These studies have initially been conducted in European and Latin American countries, including Spain, Brazil and Portugal [
6,
22,
57], although recently similar results have been found in countries such Sweden, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, Turkey or Norway [
35,
51,
54,
55,
56,
57]. Parenting styles seem to have a different impact depending on the child’s cultural background, in which parental socialization takes place [
24,
26,
44,
58,
59], and recent research seems to suggest that the use of strictness is beginning to be perceived as unnecessary in parental socialization in an increasing number of different cultural contexts.
The Present Study
This study analyzes adolescents’ self-esteem and value priorities in three countries, Spain, Brazil and Portugal. Furthermore, the impact of parenting styles on adolescents’ self-esteem and internalization of values (self-transcendence and conservation Schwartz values) [
10] is also analyzed, contrasting the three cultures. Since recent research in these (and other European and Latin American) countries points out the indulgent style as optimal for adolescent adjustment [
26,
27,
60], we expect that, despite the differences in value priorities and levels of self-esteem between adolescents from the three countries, indulgent parenting will prove to be the optimal parenting style in Spain, Portugal and Brazil. We hypothesize that indulgent parenting will be associated with higher or similar self-esteem and values internalization than authoritative parenting in the three cultures analyzed.
4. Discussion
The results of the study confirm the influence of parenting styles on self-esteem and internalization of values in Spain, Portugal and Brazil. The five self-esteem dimensions, academic, social, emotional, family and physical, are related to the parenting style utilized by the parents. Indulgent parenting emerges as the optimal parenting style for adolescents’ self-esteem, as it is associated with higher adolescent self-esteem than authoritative parenting in academic, emotional, family and physical self-esteem, and no difference can be seen for authoritative parenting on social self-esteem. Authoritarian and neglectful parenting are associated with the poorest levels of self-esteem in the five dimensions. These results are congruent with the new paradigm based on three stages for an optimal parenting style [
35], confirming the benefits for adolescent adjustment associated with the third stage (i.e., indulgent style) in the three samples of the study. Furthermore, the results are congruent with previous studies carried out in Spain, Portugal and Brazil from the beginning of the 21st century that have also analyzed the influence of parenting on self-esteem [
60,
69,
100,
101,
102]. The importance of parental warmth for adolescent self-esteem is evidenced in these results. Indulgent parenting—characterized by the use of parental warmth—is related to higher self-esteem than authoritative parenting—characterized by the use of parental warmth but also by the use of parental strictness—showing that the use of strictness would negatively affect self-esteem. The two parenting styles that are related to low self-esteem are those characterized by the lack of warmth—authoritarian and neglectful parenting.
It is important to note that the effect of parenting on adolescent self-esteem is independent of the differences between self-esteem levels in the three countries and the differences in sex and age. However, the results show some differences in self-esteem depending on the cultural context, which also affects self-esteem differently according to the sex and age of the adolescents, in congruence with the idea that adolescence is not a homogenous life-time period in all cultural contexts [
35,
103]. In this way, for example, academic self-esteem is higher in adolescents from Brazil and Portugal than in adolescents from Spain. Academic self-esteem is also higher in females and in early adolescents, as previous research has pointed out, suggesting the difference in academic achievement between sex and age that has been identified in other studies [
5,
104,
105]. These results highlight how differences between the three cultural contexts (Spain, Portugal, and Brazil), along with characteristic such as sex and age, can influence adolescents’ self-esteem. However, the relationship between parental practices and the five self-esteem facets is maintained despite these cultural and demographic differences.
Regarding values internalization, the five values priorities—which represent conservation and self-transcendence values—are also related to parenting styles. In the three countries analyzed, adolescents from indulgent and authoritative families present more internalization of universalism, benevolence, security, conformity, and tradition values, than adolescents from authoritarian and neglectful homes. In general, and consistent with previous research [
5,
6], there is no difference between authoritative and indulgent parenting for values internalization, although there are some small variations between adolescents raised with these two parenting styles in universalism and security values depending on the adolescence stage. In the case of adolescents’ internalization of values, the importance of parental warmth is also evidenced, since the two parenting styles characterized by the use of warmth—indulgent and authoritative—are associated with a higher internalization of values. However, unlike self-esteem, in this case, the use of strictness does not seem to have a negative effect on internalization of self-transcendence and conservation values, since there are no differences between authoritative and indulgent parenting. In contrast, the lack of warmth—which characterizes authoritarian and neglectful parenting—is related with lower internalization of those values.
In addition, the effect of parenting styles over adolescents’ internalization of values is maintained independent of the differences in the internalization of values between the three cultural contexts and the differences by sex and age that are reveled in the results. Differences between the level of the internalization of values appear between the three countries in self-transcendence values, with Portuguese adolescents giving the highest priority to benevolence values, followed by Brazilian adolescents and Spanish in last place. In universalism values, results showed that Spanish adolescents tend to present the lowest internalization, especially in late adolescence. Furthermore, females tend to have higher internalization of universalism and benevolence values than males in the three countries, confirming the results from some previous studies [
5,
6,
7,
35]. Some differences are also revealed in conservation values. Again, females give higher priority than males to both conformity and tradition values in the three countries. Moreover, conformity and tradition values tend to be lower in Spain, mainly in late adolescence, where a notable decrease is seen, which also is identified in Portugal.
Present findings add new empirical evidence to recent research that questions the benefits of authoritative parenting (i.e., warmth and strictness) for raising children in all cultural contexts. Although, traditionally, scholars recommended the use of strictness along with warmth as the best parenting strategy, mainly based on research conducted with middle class European–American families [
24,
36]; present findings suggest that the strictness component might not be necessary or might even have a negative impact on adolescent psychosocial adjustment in the three countries examined (i.e., Spain, Portugal and Brazil), since adolescents from indulgent homes report equal or even higher adjustment than their peers from authoritative households in terms of self-esteem and internalization of social values. The three countries examined (i.e., Spain, Portugal, and Brazil) are usually characterized as horizontal collectivist cultures, in which the self is integrated as a part of the collective (e.g., family) but relationships between members tend to be equalitarian. It is argued that, in these horizontal collectivist cultures, parental imposition and strictness might be negatively perceived by children. The results of the study are in line with some previous studies that have shown that the indulgent style (i.e., warmth without strictness) provides important benefits in terms of psychosocial adjustment for adolescents, including greater school adjustment [
106] and optimal learning strategies [
97], psychosocial development [
95] or environmental empathy and connectedness with nature [
84], and protection against alcohol use and abuse [
61], marijuana and tobacco [
95], personal maladjustment [
65] or traditional bullying and cyberbullying victimization [
27].
Despite the different pattern for self-esteem and internalization of values among adolescents from Spain, Portugal and Brazil—as revealed the differences by age, sex and country—parents’ practices from the three countries analyzed have a crucial impact during adolescence. However, as previous research has indicated, parents are not the only influence on adolescent development. In this sense, adolescents may also be influenced by different settings inside and outside the family [
107,
108,
109], including family structure (e.g., single parent, both natural parents, or one natural parent and a step-parent) [
110], parental employment [
111], peers [
112], and school [
113]. However, despite these influences, a common pattern between parenting styles, self-esteem and internalization of social was found in the three countries: indulgent parenting (parental warmth without parental strictness) is consistently related to the highest levels of adolescent self-esteem and internalization of social values.
Some limitations can be identified in the study regarding the strength of analyzing parenting styles across different cultural contexts. The study was cross-sectional and conclusions about directionality are only based on the previous literature on parenting research. Furthermore, adolescents report their own and their parents’ behavior, despite the fact that it has been shown that adolescents’ reports show lower social desirability than parents’ reports (e.g., child reports of parenting practices were significantly correlated with a greater number of psychosocial indicators than parent reports) [
114]. Finally, a common pattern of invariance was guaranteed, allowing us to emphasize a common pattern between parenting and adolescents’ self-esteem and values internalization in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil.