Parental apologies as a potential determinant of adolescents’ basic psychological needs satisfaction and frustration

Abstract

Parenting research has documented positive associations between parents’ tendency to apologize following their mishaps and indicators of adolescents’ healthy development. One mechanism that may account for these benefits is apologies’ potential role in restoring the satisfaction of adolescents’ basic psychological needs, which may have been frustrated by parents’ mishaps. Yet the associations between parental apologies, adolescents’ basic needs, and ensuing developmental outcomes have never been studied. Furthermore, how parents phrase their apologies may differently relate to adolescents’ basic needs, with victim-centered apologies being more likely to be need-supportive and defensive apologies more likely to be need-thwarting. To address these issues, we recruited 347 mid- to late adolescents and assessed parental apologies as well as adolescents’ perceptions of their basic needs at three levels of abstraction (global, situational, and hypothetical) using correlational and experimental methods. At the global level, we also assessed indicators of adolescents’ healthy development that were previously linked to parental apologies (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems and prosocial behaviors). Across abstraction levels, parental apologies—whether perceived, coded, or manipulated as presenting more victim-centered elements and fewer defensive elements—tended to be associated with higher needs satisfaction and lower needs frustration. Furthermore, path analysis showed that the relation between parental apologies and adolescents’ externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and prosocial behaviors could be fully accounted for by adolescents’ perceptions of their basic needs. These results suggest that parental apologies may play a role in adolescents’ basic psychological needs satisfaction and frustration and, in turn, in their development.