The role of depression in perceived parenting style among patients with anxiety disorders

Despite a long tradition of research on the relationship between parenting style and anxiety disorders, few studies have taken the effect of comorbid depression into account. This study investigated perceived parenting in 504 outpatients with panic disorder/agoraphobia, social phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in 210 psychology students. The anxiety group reported both parents as less caring and their fathers as more controlling than did the student group. However, these between-group differences disappeared when taking self-reported depressive symptoms into consideration. Also no differences in parental style were found between the three diagnostic anxiety groups, when depressive symptoms were taken into account. Self-reported depressive symptoms were more consistently associated with negatively perceived parenting style than with self-reported anxiety symptoms in both the anxiety group and the student group. Results do not support theories of parental control as a specific risk factor for anxiety disorders, but they are in accordance with prior findings showing an association between depression and perceived lack of parental care.