Rigid Parenting, Not Warmth, Tracks Lower Teen Empathy in Rural Türkiye

A cross-sectional study in rural eastern Türkiye links how teens perceive parenting to empathy levels. Researchers analyzed 458 high school students, aged 14 to 18, from two public single-sex schools in Bingöl during the 2022–2023 spring term. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study used the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Turkish adaptation) and a Parental Attitude Scale measuring democratic, authoritarian, and protective/demanding styles. The key finding runs counter to a common Western assumption: a “warmth”-based democratic style showed no association with empathy, while the controlling dimension carried the negative relationship. The authors used conservative statistics, including Benjamini-Hochberg correction and hierarchical regression, to isolate which parenting dimension mattered most.