A Recent Study Found That a Mom’s Parenting Style Has a Bigger Influence on Their Teens Than Dad’s

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, new research has found that the way we parent our teens is directly linked to their anxiety levels. And mothers bear the brunt of the responsibility — because of course we do.

A July 2025 study in the Adolescent Research Review studied how different parenting styles of moms and dads affect their teens’ mental health differently. They found that having warm, affectionate, and caring parents was linked to lesser anxiety symptoms, whereas cold, controlling, and harsh authoritarian parenting can increase anxiety in teens. This might be common sense, but one factor stood out: a mother’s controlling behavior has a larger influence on the teen’s social anxiety symptoms compared to a controlling father’s behavior.

“Moms and dads are both making fairly