...2003; Coopersmith, 1967; Hazzard, Christensen, Margolin, 1983; Kochanska, Grusec, & Goodnow, 1994). To evaluate the impact of parental methods of socialization on those and other child outcomes which assess children's psychological and social adjustment, some research has focused on typologies of parenting (e.g., Baumrind, 1968, 1991; Cakir & Aydin, 2005; Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994; Steinberg & Blatt-Eisengart, 2006). Two orthogonal constructs of parental behavior have traditionally been considered: demandingness and responsiveness (Baumrind, 1989, 1991; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Demandingness refers to the extent to which parents show control, power assertion, supervision, maturity demands, and set limits. Responsiveness refers to the extent to which parents show their children affective warmth and acceptance, give them support, and reason with them. Based on these two dimensions, four parenting styles have been identified (Baumrind, 1991; Maccoby & Martin, 1983): Authoritative--parents are high on both demandingness and responsiveness; Indulgent--parents are low on demandingness and high on responsiveness; Authoritarian--parents are high on demandingness and low on responsiveness; and Neglectful--parents are low on both demandingness and responsiveness.

A variety of studies conducted in the United States on European-American families have shown that authoritative parenting is associated with higher child adjustment and psychosocial competence than authoritarian, indulgent, or neglectful parenting (Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992). The results of these studies have shown that high levels of warmth, responsiveness, and involvement combined with high levels of strictness, fosters optimal adjustment in Euro-American children by offering emotional support by means of responsiveness, and establishing guidelines, limits, and expectations by means of demandingness.

However, the evidence for cross-cultural validity in the associations between parenting styles and adolescent outcomes is unclear (e.g., Steinberg, Mounts, Lamborn, & Dornbusch, 1991). There is some evidence of positive influence of the authoritarian parenting style among Asian and Arab adolescents (Chao, 2001; Dwairy, Achoui, Abouserie, & Farah, 2006; Quoss & Zhao, 1995). This result has been explained by referring to the meaning that authoritarian parenting can have in Asiatic cultures. According to Grusec, Rudy, and Martini (1997) in those contexts, strict discipline is understood as beneficial for the children; both parents and children see authoritative practices as an organizational strategy that fosters harmony within the family and ensures the child's morale (Chao 1994; Ho, 1989). It has also been suggested that for Asians the authoritarian style is associated with parental concern, caring, and love (Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989; Chao, 1994). On the other hand, in certain cultural contexts indulgent parenting has been associated with the same or better outcomes in adolescents than authoritative parenting. For example, in Spain (Musitu & Garcia, 2004) and Italy (Marchetti, 1997) it has been shown, using different parenting style measures (Musitu & Garcia, 2004), that adolescents with indulgent parents achieve equal or higher scores in self-esteem than do adolescents from authoritative parrents. Also in Mexico, Villalobos, Cruz, and Sanchez (2004) found no differences between adolescents from authoritative and indulgent parenting on diverse measures of competence and adjustment. It appears that in these countries high levels of parental affection, acceptance, and involvement are enough to obtain optimal adolescent adjustment, without the use of high levels of strictness. According to Triandis (1995), those countries can be categorized as horizontal collectivistic cultures (Gouveia, Albuquerque, Clemente, & Espinosa, 2002; Gouveia, Clemente, & Espinosa, 2003), which emphasize egalitarian relations instead of hierarchical, as is the case in vertical collectivistic or vertical individualistic cultures (Triandis, 1995, 2001). This could explain, that in those horizontal collectivistic countries the parents' use of strictness, which can denote a hierarchical relationship between parents and children, would not be necessary to set offspring limits, and consequently would not improve child adjustment. Instead, it is possible to obtain optimal offspring adjustment by controlling children's behavior just by means of reasoning practices which do not denote a hierarchical relationship.

In Brazil, although studies on parenting have shown that demandingness and responsiveness provide adequate and valid assessment information on parental styles of socialization (Costa, Teixeira, & Comes, 2000; Weber, Prado, Viezzer, & Brandenburg, 2004), no conclusive findings on the impact of parenting on children's outcomes have been obtained. For example, Oliveira, Marin, Pires, Frizzo, Ravanello, and Rossato (2002) found that children with authoritarian mothers display more externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors than do children with authoritative mothers, but they did not provide information about children with indulgent and negligent mothers. Weber, Brandenburg, and Viezzer (2003) found that children raised by authoritative parents are more optimistic than children raised by neglectful parents, but there were no differences between adolescents with authoritative parents and those with indulgent or authoritarian parents. Finally, Pacheco, Comes, and Teixeira (1999) found no advantages for children with authoritative parents in social skills, in comparison to children with the other types of parenting.

The aim of the present study, conducted with Brazilian teenagers, is to examine the relations between parenting styles and adolescents' internalization of the Schwartz values (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987, 1990) of Self-transcendence (Universalism and Benevolence) and Conservation (Security, Conformity, and Tradition) on one side and adolescent Self-esteem on the other. Self-esteem has been one of the traditional measures of adjustment in parenting studies (Barber, 1990; Barber, Chadwick, & Oerter, 1992; Felson & Zielinsky, 1989), however internalization of values has not been analyzed as much, even though some authors have stressed...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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