Abstract

Adolescence is a crucial period of life for personal and social development. The way interpersonal relationships are built depends, to a significant degree, on the adolescent´s social and prosocial abilities. Parenting styles and their dimensions have been widely studied but it is still controversial whether children who grow up in a vulnerable environment benefit from receiving a more authoritarian upbringing. The goals of this study were 1) to describe the parenting dimensions, prosocial and social skills in a group of adolescents from a vulnerable community 2) to investigate correlations between these variables. We applied three surveys (one for parenting dimensions, one for social and one for prosocial skills) to adolescents aged 14 to 18 years old from two schools in La Pintana, a low-income community in Santiago Chile. We analyzed the data and found that most adolescents considered their main caregiver to be highly demanding and highly responsive, and they also perceived high monitoring. Most adolescents were moderately socially skilled and almost one third of them were highly prosocially skilled. We also found a correlation between high parenting demandingness and monitoring with high prosocial skills among the adolescents. We conclude that demandingness and monitoring among the caregivers are indeed important for the prosocial development of adolescents in this vulnerable community. This study could be the basis to promote problem-orientated education for caregiver in schools and primary-care centers, thus, helping to break the cycle of children's environmental health disparities by supporting them in the acquisition of skills that would enable them to reach their fullest potential