Spoiling the Spoils: Indulgent Parenting Costs Parents’ Well-Being More When Adolescents Deny Receiving Much Indulgence

How does prioritizing children’s happiness over their own impact parents’ well-being? This study contributes to addressing this question by investigating the relationship between indulgent parenting (parenting style prioritizing children’s moment-to-moment happiness) and parents’ well-being through an interdependent, dyadic approach. We focus on the congruence and discrepancies in the perception of indulgent parenting between parents and adolescents, examining their associations with parents’ depressive symptoms and life satisfaction in two remarkably different cultures sharing the norm of child-centered, intensive parenting. Survey data were collected from 122 parent-adolescent dyads in the United States and 402 dyads in China. Using response surface analysis (RSA), we found that parents reported the most optimal well-being (the lowest levels of depressive symptoms and the highest levels of life satisfaction) when parents and adolescents agreed on low indulgence. Congruence on high indulgence was linked to more depressive symptoms and lower life satisfaction in parents. The worst well-being was reported by parents in dyads characterized by perception discrepancy, where parents reported providing high indulgence to their adolescent children while their adolescents reported receiving low indulgence from the parents. These patterns are generally consistent in both countries, but cultural variations are also identified – indulgent parenting appears to have a less negative association with the well-being of Chinese parents compared to American parents.