Rigid Parenting, Not Warmth, Tracks Lower Teen Empathy in Rural Türkiye

Teenagers who perceive their parents as rigid and controlling report measurably lower empathy, according to a cross-sectional study of 458 high school students in Bingöl, a rural province in eastern Türkiye. The research, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined how three dimensions of perceived parental attitude—democratic, authoritarian, and protective/demanding—relate to adolescent empathy in a traditional family context that remains underrepresented in the parenting literature. Its most consistent finding cuts against a long-standing assumption exported from Western psychology: the warmth-based democratic style, typically central to empathy research, showed no association with empathy at all, while the controlling dimension carried the entire negative signal.

The study enrolled all students in grades 9 through 12 attending two public single-sex schools in Bingöl’s central district during the spring term of the 2022–2023 academic year. Of 495 students invited, 474 returned questionnaires and 16 were excluded for invariant responding, leaving a final analytic sample of 458 adolescents aged 14 to 18—74.5 percent female, 25.5 percent male. Participants completed the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire in its Turkish adaptation, a 13-item measure yielding scores from 13 to 65, along with the Parental Attitude Scale, which produces separate Democratic, Authoritarian, and Protective/Demanding subscale scores, and a sociodemographic form. Written parental consent and student assent were obtained, with ethical approval from Istanbul Gelişim University and institutional authorization from the provincial education directorate.

The descriptive profile of the sample reflects a traditional, largely rural sociocultural setting. Mothers’ educational attainment was notably lower than fathers’: 53.1 percent of mothers had only primary school education and 14.6 percent were illiterate, while 5 percent of fathers held university degrees. Nearly half the adolescents came from households whose income merely matched expenses, and 34.5 percent reported income below expenses. Mean empathy on the TEQ was 51.97 (SD = 7.93), and subscale means suggested a parenting environment tilted toward controlling and protective approaches rather than consistently democratic ones—a pattern the authors note is consistent with demographic structures common in traditional family systems.

The statistical architecture of the paper was deliberately conservative. Group comparisons used t-tests and one-way ANOVA with effect sizes, and because dozens of comparisons were run, the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure controlled the false discovery rate within each outcome family of nine tests. The centerpiece was a hierarchical multiple regression: sex, age, and number of siblings entered first, followed by all three parenting subscales entered simultaneously—an important choice, since a composite score would have masked which dimension actually drove the association. Multicollinearity diagnostics were clean, with all variance inflation factors below 2 and all tolerance values above 0.58.

Authoritarian parenting emerged as the clear negative predictor. Bivariately, it correlated with empathy at r = −0.162, and after adjustment for demographics and the other two parenting dimensions it remained significant with a standardized coefficient of β = −0.170 (p = 0.002, 95% CI for the unstandardized coefficient [−0.418, −0.095]). Crucially, the association held even after the democratic subscale was entered into the same model, indicating that it does not simply reflect an absence of warmth but is attributable to the controlling component itself. The magnitude sits squarely within the range typically reported in the parenting literature, where associations between parenting dimensions and adolescent socio-emotional outcomes commonly fall between r = 0.15 and r = 0.25.

The authors offer an interpretive, and explicitly inferential, account: rigid control may constrain the interactional conditions under which perspective-taking is practiced. Where parental directives are issued without explanation and disagreement is discouraged, adolescents have fewer occasions to articulate their own position, encounter a differing one, and negotiate between them. But the cross-sectional design cannot distinguish this pathway from the reverse—that empathic adolescents elicit or perceive less controlling parenting—or from a shared antecedent influencing both. As the authors stress, the finding identifies a modifiable correlate, not a demonstrated causal mechanism.

Protective/demanding parenting told a subtler story. Its bivariate correlation with empathy was weak and of borderline significance (r = 0.092, p = 0.050), but after adjustment the coefficient strengthened to β = 0.131 (p = 0.006). The strengthening reflects statistical suppression: protective/demanding scores were higher in the male-only school, which also reported lower empathy, so the two associations partially masked one another until sex was held constant. The authors are careful not to overread this—they estimate the unique variance at roughly 1.5 percent and explicitly do not claim protective parenting fosters empathy. What the finding does show is that protectiveness and authoritarian control are not interchangeable forms of involvement: entered simultaneously, they carried coefficients of opposite sign, suggesting that protective attentiveness may convey engagement even where it restricts autonomy, whereas rigid control carries no such compensating component.

The most conceptually provocative result concerns the democratic dimension. Democratic parenting was uncorrelated with empathy at both the bivariate level (r = −0.079, p = 0.093) and in the adjusted model (β = −0.026, p = 0.648), and the authors argue this null is informative rather than indeterminate: the 95 percent confidence interval excludes standardized effects larger than 0.14, the study was powered at 0.80 to detect effects of 0.16 or more, and the subscale’s internal consistency was adequate at α = 0.733. An association of the magnitude typically reported in Western samples would have been detectable. Complicating the picture further, the democratic and authoritarian subscales were themselves moderately positively correlated (r = 0.586)—the strongest inter-subscale association in the sample—directly contradicting the orthogonal structure classical typologies assume. In this context, warmth and control do not appear to function as opposing dimensions.

Among family variables, parental education was unrelated to both empathy and parenting scores, with all effect sizes negligible, consistent with the idea that interaction quality matters more than formal attainment. The only family-level comparison to survive multiple-testing correction involved siblings: adolescents with one to three siblings reported higher empathy than those with six or more (η² = 0.021), and sibling number correlated negatively with empathy overall (r = −0.126, p = 0.007). The dilution account—that larger households afford less individualized parental attention—is plausible but untested, and family size may equally be a marker of broader cultural and economic conditions. A female advantage in empathy (d = 0.54, p < 0.001) matched well-replicated findings in the self-report literature, though the design cannot attribute it to sex: because the two schools were single-sex, sex and school context are fully confounded. Higher academic achievers also reported greater empathy, but grading norms differ between the schools’ programs, and no adolescent-reported contrast involving the parenting subscales survived correction.

Taken together, the model explained 12.5 percent of the variance in empathy (adjusted R² = 0.113), with the parenting dimensions contributing 4.2 percentage points beyond demographics—the substantive increment showing that perceived parenting carries information about adolescent empathy that demographic position alone does not. The authors’ conclusion is correspondingly narrow but pointed: the relevant distinction in this setting is not between warm and controlling parenting, which were positively correlated, but between forms of control that permit negotiation and forms that do not. Family-based approaches to adolescent socio-emotional development should attend to authoritarian control specifically, and the cross-cultural applicability of Western parenting typologies in traditional family systems warrants direct examination rather than assumption. The authors also flag their limitations frankly: both measures relied on adolescent self-report, the TEQ yields a single total score that does not separate affective from cognitive empathy, the PAS does not distinguish behavioral from psychological control, and the sample from a single rural province limits generalizability to urban and other cultural settings. Longitudinal, multi-informant designs—and measures separating behavioral from psychological control—will be needed to establish directionality and test the interpretations offered here.

Subject of Research: Associations between perceived parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural Turkish province

Article Title: Parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye

Article References: Baraç, S., & Sarikavak, T. (2026). Parental attitudes and adolescent empathy in a rural sociocultural context in Türkiye. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1944408. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1944408

Keywords: adolescent empathy, parenting styles, authoritarian parenting, democratic parenting, Türkiye, cross-cultural psychology, cross-sectional study, rural families, socio-emotional development, hierarchical regression, Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, Frontiers in Psychology