Paternal malparenting and offspring personality disorders: Mediating effect of early maladaptive schemas.

OBJECTIVE

To examine the mediating role of maladaptive schemas between permissive/authoritarian parenting by fathers and personality disorders, including histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic and depressive attitudes among adults.

METHODS

This cross-sectional study was conducted at the University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan, and comprised university students. Data was collected by administering the parental authority questionnaire, the young schema questionnaire and the personality diagnostic questionnaire. SPSS 23 was used for data analysis. The study was completed in one year. It was started from June 2014 and ended in June 2015.

RESULTS

Of the 200 participants who were handed the questionnaires, 100(50%) returned it fully filled up. Of them, 87(87%) were women and 13(13%) were men. All scales had greater than 0.70 alpha reliability coefficients. The values of skewness for all scales ranged from 0.10 to 0.86.Permissive parenting style had positive correlation with histrionic (p<0.05), narcissistic (p<0.05) and antisocial personality disorders (p<0.01). Authoritarian parenting had positive correlation with early maladaptive schemas (p<0.01) and depressive personality disorder (p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

Both permissive and authoritarian parenting styles led to personality disorders among offspring in the adult phase of their lives.