Parental Overprotection and Adolescent Mental Health: The Mediating Roles of Psychological Resilience and Bullying Victimization

ABSTRACT

Parental overprotection—marked by excessive control and restricted autonomy—can hinder adolescents' emotional growth and social competence. This study examined how psychological resilience and bullying victimization explain the link between overprotective parenting and adolescent mental health in a clinical sample. Data were collected from 219 adolescents and young adults (aged 12–25 years) attending a psychiatric outpatient clinic in China, using self‐report measures of parental overprotection, resilience, bullying victimization, psychotic‐like experiences (PLEs), depression, and anxiety. Parental overprotection was positively associated with PLEs, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, and sequential mediation analyses showed that all three indirect pathways were significant across outcomes: via lower resilience, via higher bullying victimization, and through the sequential pathway from lower resilience to greater bullying victimization. As direct effects remained significant across all three models, the associations were only partially mediated. Together, these findings suggest that overprotective parenting may heighten adolescents' mental‐health risks by weakening resilience and increasing peer stress, and they support coordinated family‐, school‐, and service‐based responses for help‐seeking adolescents exposed to overprotective parenting and peer stress.