How Anxiety and Anger Shape Our Satisfaction With Life—Thanks, Mom and Dad
Sunday, June 22, 2025. This is for Lisa, who knows.
Or: Why I keep asking about your childhood
By the time you’re 22, your frontal lobe is just barely open for business, your student debt has metastasized into a personality trait, and you’re beginning to suspect that your so-called adult life might be an elaborate payback plan for how your parents raised you.
Welcome to Italy, land of espresso, existential dread, and—if recent research is to be believed—overprotective parenting that can quietly fry your nervous system.
A recent study by Italian researchers Martina Smorti and colleagues (2024), published in the Journal of Psychology, took a magnifying glass to the Italian family dynamic and discovered something unnervingly elegant: the way your parents bonded with you—whether they coddled you like a houseplant or cared for you like a sentient being—echoes forward into your adult life through the neurotic relay race of anxiety and anger.
Parenting: It’s Not Just a Job, It’s a Generational Feedback Loop
Let’s start with parental bonding, which, in psychological terms, is the warm-fuzzy glue that ideally forms between parent and child sometime between birth and the first time you throw a tantrum in a grocery store. It’s a cocktail of warmth, responsiveness, and a sort of spiritual alertness to a child’s needs that ideally results in that rare creature: a securely attached human.
But not all glue sticks the same way.
Researchers focused on two primary flavors of bonding:
Care: which is the kind of attention that says “I see you, I value you, I’ll let you fall just enough to learn.”
Overprotection: which is the well-meaning but anxiety-inducing art of smothering your child with bubble wrap and existential dread.
The Data: 369 Italians, All Grown Up (Mostly)
Smorti’s team surveyed 369 young adults (average age: 22; 242 women), using gold-standard psychological measures like the Parental Bonding Instrument, Beck Anxiety Inventory, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Imagine filling out a survey about your mom’s emotional availability and how often you cry in the shower—and you’ve got the gist.
Here’s what they found:
Higher parental care was associated with better anger regulation (i.e., fewer hole-punched walls), lower anxiety, and more life satisfaction.
Higher parental overprotection was a kind of silent saboteur—raising anxiety, ramping up the urge to yell at traffic, and decreasing overall life satisfaction.
Curiously, maternal overprotection seemed to have a stronger link to poor anger control than paternal overprotection. Make of that what you will, Freud.
In other words, your parents’ emotional choreography when you were five may be why you panic in group chats or silently seethe at the coworker who misuses “literally.”
Why This Matters: You’re Not Just Overreacting
What’s striking is how the researchers mapped anger and anxiety as psychological intermediaries—emotional middlemen ferrying the influence of your upbringing straight into your adult sense of contentment. The idea is simple but profound: the feelings you learned to regulate (or didn’t) in response to your caregivers still color your view of the world.
Anxiety is how your nervous system whispers, “You’re not safe.”
Anger is how your brain yells, “This is unfair.”
Life satisfaction is the quiet background hum when neither of those alarms are going off all the time.
So when a parent is overprotective, a child may learn: “The world is dangerous. I must worry all the time.” And when a parent is warm but allows room for autonomy, the child internalizes: “I can handle things. My feelings don’t have to eat me alive.”
These aren’t just parenting styles. They’re early blueprints for how we walk through the world.
Limitations: Correlation Is Not Time Travel
Of course, like any good psychological study, this one comes with caveats. It's cross-sectional—a snapshot, not a time-lapse.
That means we can’t say with certainty that overprotective parenting causes anxiety, just that they hang out together at the same parties.
But the findings are part of a growing body of research suggesting that early emotional environments shape adult regulatory systems, both in terms of neurobiology (see: amygdala overactivation, cortisol dysregulation) and psychology (see: that existential whimper you emit when your mom calls unexpectedly).
As for the angry young adults? They weren’t monsters. They were just trying to metabolize unmet needs.
Raise Your Kids Like They’ll One Day Write a Tell-All Memoir
In short: if you're feeling anxious, irritable, and vaguely dissatisfied with life, don’t just blame the economy or TikTok.
Blame the intricate psychological inheritance passed down by your parents, and then—if you’re lucky—do the slow, boring work of untangling it.
Because good parenting doesn’t mean protecting your kid from every possible heartbreak. It means giving them the emotional compass to find meaning in the storm.
And sometimes, the biggest act of love is just learning to unclench.
Would you like a companion guide for parents or adult clients on "Breaking the Overprotection-Anxiety Cycle"? Drop me a line and tell me about it.
Be Well, Stay Calm, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Smorti, M., Alsancak-Akbulut, C., Pozza, F., & Montiel, C. B. (2024). Exploring the links between parental bonding and life satisfaction: Anxiety and anger as underlying mechanisms. Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2024.XXXXX
Beck, A. T., Epstein, N., Brown, G., & Steer, R. A. (1988). An inventory for measuring clinical anxiety: Psychometric properties. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56(6), 893–897. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.56.6.893
Spielberger, C. D. (1999). State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2): Professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71–75. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa4901_13