Parenting Attitude and Style and Its Effect on Children\'s School Achievements

Parenting Attitude and Style and Its Effect on Children's School Achievements.

This reading assessment examines the connection between parenting attitudes and styles and children's school achievements.

Kordi and Baharudin (2010) identify three distinct parenting style constructs. These include the authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative parenting styles. Inherent in these are characteristics such as certain levels of maturity, various types of communication style, levels of nurturance, warmth, and involvement.

According to the authors, the authoritarian parenting style creates an environment in which children are required to be submissive to their parents, while the parents' attitude are generally strict and directive while being emotionally distant and detached. The permissive parenting style, on the other hand, involves an attitude that includes fewer restrictions and limitations on the child. Children are, instead, expected to regulate themselves and their own activities. The authoritative parenting style is similar to the authoritarian style in terms of clear and firm direction, but differs in terms of warmth, reason, and flexibility. The parental attitude in this style is one of loving direction, where discipline is moderated by emotional warmth and attachment to the child.

As the article progresses, the authors make a distinction between the parenting style/achievement correlations for European-American students and Asian students. According to the literature, Asian students tend to perform better, despite the assumed shortcomings of the authoritarian parenting style.

What is interesting about these findings is that the authors mention a marked lack of quantitative study in terms of these results. Another limitation is the general perception of Asian parenting as authoritarian, without consideration of possible mitigating and inherent cultural factors. The attempted explanations of this phenomenon as driven by peer influence is simply not very credible. Such a statement should be qualified by further quantitative study. As the authors indeed admit, further study is necessary to determine findings regarding the differences between Asian and European-American students.

Because the home is the first socializing environment that children encounter, researchers have acknowledged the importance of this environment in promoting a child's ability to achieve acceptable and even exceptional results at school. Hence, studies have begun to focus attention on the connection between parenting styles and school achievements in children. Socialization is a vitally important process that ensures the integration of children not only in the home and school environment, but also in society in general, where they will function as working adults when they grow up.

Importantly, Kordi and Baharudin's literature review reveals extensive studies focusing on parenting style in terms of human development. Parenting style is not only related to children's achievement, but also to their level of optimism, confidence, motivation, externalizing problem behavior, and attention problems. Of course, these issues all have an effect on the eventual academic achievement of the child.