The relationship with parents throughout the developmental stages is an important aspect of one's social life and functioning in interpersonal relationships. The master's thesis aimed to identify and examine the possible relations between the satisfaction of relational needs with the quality of the early parent-child relationship (in the first 16 years of life) and with the psychological individuation from parents. I was also interested in the relation between an early parent-child relation and the current individuation process in relation to the parents. The sample included 153 individuals between the ages of 18 and 27. I surveyed through an online survey using some demographic questions followed by the TOPO (Individuation Test for Emerging Adults), the Relational Needs Satisfaction Scale (RNSS), and the Parental Bonding Inventory (PBI). The correlation and regression analysis were used to determine the relationship between the constructs. The results showed that early parental relationship and psychological individuation are associated with the overall satisfaction of relational needs and also with some individual relational needs (with correlation coefficient being lower to medium-high). Warm and empathetic early parent-child relation, connectedness, and support seeking from parents are associated with higher satisfaction of relational needs while parental overprotection negatively correlates with the satisfaction of the relational needs. The early parent-child relation also explains some of the variances in the satisfaction of relational needs although individual predictors did not prove statistically significant. We also found that based on paternal and maternal care and overprotection, we can predict some aspects of psychological individuation in relation to the parents. The research contributes to an additional understanding of interpersonal relationships in terms of relationships with parents while the findings also contribute to a better understanding of relational needs which are still relatively unexplored.
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