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Abstract Puberty is a critical period for adolescents’ self-esteem, as it plays an irreplaceable role in the course of forming future patterns of psychological well-being and social adaption in adulthood. Self-esteem in adolescence is the result of interactions between self-experience and social-role changes that accompany puberty, shaped by family-related determinants and parent-child relations that affect the uptake of self-esteem. As a traditional culture of China, various classical texts and daily ritual activities have been taken to help developing self-esteem during family rituals. It’s a tradition to value family rituals as indoctrinations for teenagers’ socialization, and various classical texts and daily ritual activities are manifestation. However, without reliable measure tools in this field, the role of family rituals in promoting adolescents’ self-esteem and the underlying mechanisms are rarely addressed. Thus, the role of family rituals in promoting adolescents’ self-esteem and the underlying mechanisms have long posed a conundrum. In view of this, the study aims at exploring whether family ritual has significant impacts on the development of self-esteem in adolescence, and how it works.
There are two possible mechanisms. Firstly, family rituals promote parent-child attachment, which in return enhances adolescents’ self-esteem. During family rituals, parents and adolescents engage in adequate and positive interpersonal interactions that promote parent-child attachment. Secondly, family rituals promote the development of self-esteem by facilitating adolescents’ meaning in life, while the symbolic meanings embedded in family rituals can help adolescents develop and experience meaning in life. According to the terror management theory, self-esteem consists of a sense of meaning and significance.
To investigate the positive effect and possible mechanism, 544 high school students in Hangzhou were invited to participate in this study. Family Ritual Questionnaire (Chinese version, FRQ-CV), Parent-Child Attachment Scale, Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and Self-Esteem Scale were used. Meanwhile, their gender, age, residence, and family socioeconomic status were also collected. The study used SPSS 24.0 to perform correlational analysis, RWA-Web to perform relative weight analysis, and PROCESS plug-in for intermediary structure modelling analysis and bootstrap path effect analysis. The main findings were as follows: family rituals had a significant predictive effect on self-esteem, while both parent-child attachment and meaning in life mediated the effect. Moreover, family rituals promoted self-esteem through a chain mechanism of parent-child attachment and meaning in life. In addition, this study also used the relative weight analysis to explore the relationship between different types of family rituals and adolescents’ self-esteem, suggesting that participation in and interaction during family traditional activities and celebrations, and symbolic meaning perception of family interaction patterns were particularly vital for cultivating adolescents’ self-esteem.
The current findings suggest that family rituals promote adolescents’ parent-child attachment and meaning in life, thereby enhancing their self-esteem. The results support and expand previous research on the direct and indirect effects of family rituals in family and individual positive outcomes. Overall, this study can help family ritual researchers construct a theoretical model of family rituals in terms of the symbolic meaning in family rituals. In practical terms, this study also reminds parents that family rituals are important ways of parent-child interaction within the family and play a special and irreplaceable role in adolescents’ psychosocial development. It is necessary to give family interaction patterns, such as family dinner and weekend mundane, a specific symbolic significance, while strengthening interactions during family traditional events and festivals to improve adolescents’ self-esteem.
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Published: 30 September 2022
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