When children come to feel that their parents’ affection rises and falls with their behavior or results, they tend to report more fragile self-worth and more symptoms of depression. That is the central finding of a meta-analysis published in 2022 in the Journal of Adolescence, which pooled data from 31 samples covering 11,404 young people, from pre-adolescents to young adults.
The review, by Jolene Haines and Nicola Schutte of the University of New England in Australia, brought together research on what psychologists call parental conditional regard. Its results are correlational, and the link with depression was weaker than the others. But the analysis also turned up a distinction that matters for parents: the depression link was concentrated in one particular form of conditional love.
What researchers mean by conditional regard
Conditional regard describes parents’ use of affection as a lever. It comes in two forms. In conditional positive regard, parents give more warmth and attention when a child meets their expectations. In conditional negative regard, parents withdraw warmth when a child falls short, becoming colder until the child does better.
The idea comes from self-determination theory, a framework developed by psychologists Deci and Ryan. Early studies by Assor, Roth and Deci, published in 2004 in the Journal of Personality, found that university students who perceived conditional regard were more likely to act out of internal pressure, felt only short-lived satisfaction after success, reported shame and guilt after failure, and described self-esteem that fluctuated more.
Most studies in the field measure children’s and young people’s own perceptions, usually through questionnaires about how their mothers and fathers behave toward them.
What the meta-analysis found
Haines and Schutte combined the available samples to estimate how strongly conditional regard was associated with four outcomes. According to the published paper, conditional regard was associated with:
More introjected regulation, the sense of acting under internal pressure or to avoid guilt, with a correlation of 0.33 across five samples. More contingent self-esteem, meaning self-worth that depends on performance or approval, with a correlation of 0.29 across 12 samples and nearly 3,900 participants. More depressive symptoms, with a correlation of 0.22 across four samples and about 2,600 participants. And a weaker sense of relatedness, or closeness to others, with a correlation of minus 0.24 across 11 samples.
In the authors’ terms, the associations with introjected regulation, contingent self-esteem and relatedness were moderate, and the association with depressive symptoms was weak. Correlations of this size mean conditional regard accounts for only a modest share of the differences between young people. They are, however, consistent across a substantial number of participants.
Withdrawing love versus giving more of it
The most useful result for families came from separating the two forms of conditional regard. For depressive symptoms, the difference was stark. Conditional negative regard, withdrawing affection after failure, had a correlation of 0.40 with depressive symptoms. Conditional positive regard, giving extra affection after success, had a correlation of 0.07, which was not statistically significant.
For acting under internal pressure, the pattern ran the other way: the link was stronger for conditional positive regard (0.33) than for negative regard (0.20). For contingent self-esteem and relatedness, the two forms looked similar.
These results echo an earlier study by Roth and colleagues, published in 2009 in Developmental Psychology. Surveying two groups of Israeli ninth graders, 169 and 156 students, the researchers found that conditional positive regard was linked to a sense of internal compulsion and to suppressing negative emotions, while conditional negative regard was linked to resentment toward parents and difficulty regulating negative emotions. Both looked worse than an autonomy-supportive approach, which was linked to a sense of choice and more flexible handling of emotions.
Taken together, the work suggests that giving extra warmth for success is not harmless, because it is linked to pressure and to self-worth that depends on performance. But withdrawing warmth after failure appears to carry the clearer link to low mood.
Mothers, fathers and the gaps in the evidence
The meta-analysis found no significant difference between conditional regard from mothers and from fathers on most outcomes. It could not test whether the associations differed by age or culture, and the paper does not report which countries the samples came from.
The authors are direct about the limits. “The present findings are correlational, preventing causal conclusions,” they write. The relationship could run in both directions: a child who is already struggling may draw more conditional responses from a parent. Other factors, including shared genes, could explain part of the link. Many participants were teenagers or young adults recalling how their parents behaved, which raises questions about memory. And the analyses for depressive symptoms and introjected regulation rested on only four and five samples respectively.
Few longitudinal or experimental studies exist in this area, and the authors call for more of both, including trials of parenting programs.
What the authors recommend
Despite the caveats, Haines and Schutte draw a practical conclusion. Conditional regard, they write, “may be a strategy best avoided.” They suggest that parenting programs could include a module aimed at reducing its use, alongside strategies that support children’s autonomy and convey that parental love does not depend on performance.
For parents, the finding does not mean praise or disappointment are off limits. The distinction the research draws is about whether a child comes to feel that being loved, rather than being praised for a particular effort, depends on doing well. On the evidence so far, the less that is the case, the better young people tend to fare.
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