Patterns of Family Functioning and Parenting Style of Adolescents with Depressive Reactions

AbstractThis paper examines family functioning from the systemic perspective while endeavoring to point out to the correlation between family functioning, parenting style and depressive reactions of adolescents. The research was conducted with the aim to determine a correlation between patterns of family functioning, parenting style and presence of adolescents’ depressive reactions. A FACES III (Olson, Portner & Levi, 1985) and EMBU (Arrindell, 2005) scales were used in order to determine the patterns of family functioning and parenting style. Two groups of adolescents were examined: 20 adolescents with depressive reactions who had ambulance or hospital treatment at the Clinic for Mental Health Protection in Nis and 20 adolescents who did not have any problems with depressive reactions. The results showed that there are statistically significant differences between these two groups. Statistically significant difference between families of depressed adolescents and adolescents from the control group has been present on the dimension of cohesion (t (38)=2.896, p<0.01) arithmetic mean for cohesiveness in the families of depressed adolescents is 34.35, while for the subjects from the control group is significantly above 41.05, which indicates that closeness, togetherness and a sense of belonging to the family are very important for the development outcomes of adolescents. Mothers of depressed adolescents who have expressed overprotective have low flexibility (r=-0473, p<0.05). Also, low emotional warmth of the mother points to the low flexibility and vice versa (r=0.451, p<0.05). When we talk about the sample of fathers, high rejecting of fathers indicates on low cohesiveness of the family system (r=-0.699, p<0.01), expressed overprotective of fathers also indicates to the low cohesiveness of the family system (r=-0576, p<0.01 level), and it is also associated with the denial of the emotional warmth of fathers toward their children (r=0.762, p