Intensive parenting among mothers and fathers: Identifying profiles and examining differences in parental involvement

The literature reveals particularly high standards of good parenting in Western societies, especially for mothers. However, parents as active agents of their parenting may react differently to societal prescriptions, and this variability may translate into different parental practices. The present article had two aims. A first aim was to identify profiles of parents by considering their adherence to intensive parenting beliefs, their perceived societal pressure to be a perfect parent, and their gender essentialist beliefs (i.e., the idea that mothers are naturally better parents than fathers). A second aim was to examine differences between parent profiles in terms of positive and negative parental involvement. To identify clusters among mothers and fathers, we conducted model-based cluster analysis (Fraley & Raftery, 1998) on a sample of 1,002 Belgian parents (609 mothers and 393 fathers) of adolescents (M_age = 16.83, SD = 0.96; 53% girls), based on parents' scores on intensive parenting beliefs, gender essentialism, and perceived societal pressure. Differences between mothers' and fathers' clusters were examined in terms of interpersonal involvement, responsiveness, autonomy support, overprotection and controlling parenting. Analyses revealed five clusters for mothers and three for fathers. In both samples, traditional intensive profiles were associated to higher levels of parental overprotection and controlling parenting whereas no cluster differences were found in terms of positive parenting. These results suggest that demanding social prescriptions of parenthood may have an ironical effect as they might push some mothers and fathers to adopt parenting practices that are less attuned to their adolescents' developmental needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).