This study investigates the ways in which parental care and parental control affect adolescents' character strengths in the areas of authenticity, bravery, perseverance, kindness, love, social intelligence, fairness and self-regulation. The basic premise is that these two parental bonding factors may have different effects on adolescent outcomes. To test this conjecture, we use survey data collected from a territory-wide sample of 2010 Chinese adolescents recruited from 17 secondary schools located in different districts of Hong Kong. The results support our hypotheses that parental care and parental control have significantly positive and negative effects, respectively, on the above character strengths. In addition, the results indicate that gender has significant effects on authenticity, bravery, kindness and love whereas age has significant effects on kindness and fairness. The implications of the findings for further research and service provision are discussed.
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