Perceived Parental Favoritism as a Predictor of Sense of Entitlement Among Adolescents: Evidence from a Pakistani Sample

Abstract

Contemporary developmental perspectives suggest that entitlement does not emerge abruptly in adulthood but is gradually shaped during childhood and adolescence, particularly within early family environments. The present study examined parental differential treatment (PDT) as predictor of psychological entitlement among adolescents with respect to four facets of parental favouritism namely Differential Maternal Affection (DMA), Differential Maternal Control (DMC), Differential Paternal Affection (DFA), and Differential Paternal Control (DFC). The population of this study was school or college students with an age range of 13-17. A purposive sampling technique with a correlation design was employed, and the survey method was used to gather data from (N = 319) participants. The sibling inventory of differential experience (SIDE; Daniels & Plomin, 1985), the psychological entitlement scale (PES; Campbell et al., 2004), and the brief resilience scale (BRS; Smith et al., 2008) were used. The data was analyzed through SPSS-27. The results showed that there is strong positive correlation were found between entitlement and both differential maternal affection (r = .78, p < .001) and differential paternal affection (r = .84, p < .001), while differential maternal control (r = −.82, p < .001), and differential paternal control (r = −.72, p < .001) were negatively associated with entitlement. Results indicated that differential paternal affection (β = .42, p < .001) emerged as the strongest positive predictor of entitlement, followed by differential maternal affection (β = .29, p < .001). In contrast, differential maternal control (β = −.31, p < .001) and differential paternal control (β = −.18, p < .01) were found to be significant negative predictors. There was also a gender difference in psychological entitlement; male adolescents scored significantly higher than female adolescents, t(317) = 3.86, p < .001, d = 0.45 (M = 42.68, SD = 7.24 for males; M = 39.51, SD = 6.89 for females). There were no significant gender differences among adolescents with low, equal, and high levels of the four dimensions of parental favouritism. The overall results indicate that perceived differences in parental affection and control are significantly linked to sense of entitlement of adolescents.