The associations between parent-child congruence and incongruence in filial piety and adolescent depression and gender differences

As one of the core values of Chinese culture, filial piety is an important value norm and standard for maintaining parent-child relationship and supporting family functioning in contemporary society. The filial piety may be incongruent between parents and children in one family, and its psychological influences on children are unknown. In view of the fact that depression is a prominent and frequent emotional problem in adolescents, and family pressure stemming from parent-child relationship is a major risk factor for adolescent depression, this study aimed to explore the relationship between parent-child congruence and incongruence in filial piety and adolescent depression. Given that adolescents tend to take their same-sex parents as role models, parent and child gender differences were also considered.The longitudinal data of 3321 adolescents (1692 boys, 1629 girls; average age = 10.87 ± 0.36 years) and their fathers and mothers were used, which were collected when the adolescents were in 5th and 7th grades. In the first wave, after given their informed consent, both adolescents and their fathers and mothers reported their concept of filial piety. In the second wave, both adolescents and their fathers and mothers reported their levels of depression. The polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to explore the relationship between parent-child congruence and incongruence in filial piety and adolescent depression. SPSS 22.0, Mplus 7.1, and Matlab 2022b were used to analyze the data.The results showed that: (1) when parents’ and adolescents’ filial piety were congruent, the congruent level of fathers’ and son’ reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety, mothers’ and sons’ reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety, fathers’ and daughters’ reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety and mothers’ and daughters’ reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety did not significantly predict adolescents’ depression. (2) when parents’ and adolescents’ filial piety were incongruent, the direction of discrepancies between fathers’ and sons’ reciprocal filial piety predicted the sons’ depression. The direction of discrepancies between fathers’ and daughters’ reciprocal filial piety, fathers’ and daughters’ authoritarian filial piety, mothers’ and daughters’ reciprocal filial piety and mothers’ and daughters’ authoritarian filial piety predicted the daughters’ depression. Moreover, the degree of discrepancies between fathers’ and sons’ authoritarian filial piety predicted sons’ depression. The degree of discrepancies between fathers’ and daughters’ authoritarian filial piety, mothers’ and daughters’ reciprocal filial piety and mothers’ and daughters’ authoritarian filial piety predicted the daughters’ depression.The results indicated that when parents and children reach a consensus on filial piety, the type and level of filial piety are not related to adolescents’ depression, but the incongruences between fathers’ and sons’ filial piety and parents’ and daughters’ filial piety may induce adolescents’ depression.