Abstract:

Healthy, functional relationships between parents and children are essential and important for an individual’s development not only in early childhood but also in adulthood. In this context, the quality of the mother-child relationship has been discussed extensively in the literature, but the quality of the father-child relationship has rarely been evaluated. In the present study, the quality of father-child relationships is operationalised as an emotional availability. The present study, which is based on Attachment Theory, aimed to investigate the mediating role of resilience in the association between the retrospective perception of university students’ emotional availability of their fathers and their subjective well-being at emerging adulthood. For this purpose, 257 university students with a mean age of 22.42 (SD = 2.08) in North Cyprus participated in the study. Participants completed the Brief Resilience Scale, the Lum Emotional Availability of Parents Scale and the Subjective Well-Being Scale. The Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to examine the potential relationships between study variables as well as examine the mediating effect of resilience in the link between the emerging adults’ retrospective perceptions of the emotional availability of fathers and their current subjective well-being. The results provide support for the hypothesised model. The results indicated that resilience may act as a full mediator in the relationship between the retrospective perceptions of emerging adults’ emotional availability of their fathers and their current subjective well-being. Findings imply that the retrospective perceptions emotional availability of fathers increase the subjective well-being of emerging adults throughout the mediation of the resilience. These findings shed a first light on the mediating role of resilience in the association between the retrospective perception of emerging adults’ emotional availability of their fathers and their subjective well-being. Moreover, the findings of the present study may help counsellors working in universities to improve resilience interventions that could lead to an improvement in the subjective well-being of students. The study also points out that practitioners who are working with parents should focus on effective parenting interventions and these interventions should also target fathers.

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