Abstract
Research has consistently shown parents' nurturance, acceptance, affection, support, and attention to be positively related to their children's self-esteem. Absent in these investigations of the relationship between parental nurturance and self-esteem, however, has been a consideration of whether the nurturance bases upon which these "reflected appraisals" of self-esteem are evaluated vary with changes in age. This study was conducted to investigate the stability of parental nurturance as a basis for mid-adolescent and late-adolescent judgments of global self-esteem. Data were collected from three samples: 61 15-year-old high school sophomores, 98 17-year-old high school juniors and seniors, and 333 19-year-old college students. All subjects were from intact families; high school students were living with their parents. All subjects completed a demographic questionnaire, the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and two forms of the Parental Nurturance Scale to measure mother's nurturance and father's nurturance. The results revealed that the self-esteem scores for the 19-year-olds were significantly higher than the scores for the younger age groups. Self-esteem was found to be strongly related to both mother's and father's nurturance at all three age levels. This high level of stability in the relationship between parental nurturance and adolescent's self-esteem across all three age groups suggests that parental nurturance is an important "arena of comfort" for adolescents during the potentially turbulent adolescent years. (NB)