Parents’ Wisdom and Adolescents’ Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Developmental Qualities

Abstract

This study investigated relations of parental three-dimensional wisdom on 15–17-year-old adolescents’ cognitive, social, and emotional developmental qualities. Families were recruited in 10th and 11th grades of public schools in Yazd, Iran, and a total of 140 father–mother–adolescent triads participated in the research. In multivariate regression analyses, parental wisdom was positively related to adolescents’ social intelligence and emotional competence but unrelated to adolescents’ cognitive skills and intelligence. Moreover, significant interaction effects between parental wisdom and adolescent gender showed that paternal wisdom only predicted sons’ social intelligence and emotional competence, whereas maternal wisdom only predicted daughters’ social intelligence and emotional competence. These results indicate that (a) wise parents appear to be role models for the social and emotional development of same sex adolescents and (b) intellectual development depends on other factors than parental wisdom. This suggests that promoting wisdom development in parents likely benefits the psychosocial development of their children.