Abstract

Parents within the family system have been known to have profound events on the development of their children. The parent’s support and control provided to the child are seen as important aspects of parenting with major impacts, so the early childhood phase is known as a critical period in terms of investigating the factors that lead to the development of negative cognitive structure. The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether perceived parental psychological control has an effect on children's automatic thoughts. For this purpose, the Children’s Automatic Thoughts Scale, Psychological Control Scale and Socio-Demographical Information Form have been applied to participants between the ages of 7-16 (n=82). The study demonstrated that the perceived parental psychological control predicted the development of negative automatic thoughts in children. As a result, as the perceived parental psychological control increases, the negative automatic thoughts of children also increase. One of the fundamental assumptions of CBT is that negative automatic thoughts play a fundamental role in the development of psychopathological cases. Based on the results of this study, new approaches can be developed to prevent the factors that cause psychopathology development in early phases of childhood.

Key words: Automatic thoughts, psychological control, parental control, children’s automatic thoughts