Exploring Associations Between Student Academic Achievement, Worry, Personality, and Parental Warmth and Control

This correlational study evaluates the relationships between academic achievement, worry, personality, and parental warmth and control. Results add to the existing literature surrounding what behaviors parents may or may not practice when raising their children and what connections these behaviors may have to their children succeeding academically and/or experiencing worrisome thoughts when they’re college-aged. Additionally, the role of student personality in parenting behaviors, academic achievement, and worry is evaluated. Multiple correlational hypotheses are offered and evaluated along with a moderation model (personality and worry as moderators of the relationship between parenting and academic achievement). 273 college students completed an online survey responding to items assessing their academic achievement (high school and college GPAs & ACT scores), general level of worry, personality (conscientiousness, neuroticism, love of learning, and achievement striving), and the warmth and control displayed by up to three caregivers. Results showed significant positive correlations between parental warmth and academic achievement, parental warmth and conscientiousness, male parental control and worry (r = .20, p < .01), parental control and neuroticism, conscientiousness and high school GPA (r = .21, p < .01), and between neuroticism and worry (r = .76, p < .01). Significant negative correlations were found between parental control and academic achievement and between parental warmth and neuroticism. Model testing partially supported the hypothesis that personality and worry moderate the relationship between parenting and academic achievement. Complete results of this study may be helpful in informing the ways parents behave to increase the likelihood that their children develop into academically successful and mentally healthy individuals. ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, WORRY, PERSONALITY, AND PARENTING Kaufling 3 Exploring Associations Between Student Academic Achievement, Worry, Personality, and Parental Warmth and Control Many parents continually seek best practices to ensure that their children will be successful, fulfilled, and contributing members of society. Countless parenting books have been written with the sole focus of how to raise good children. Parents want their children to not only succeed in life, but also to be happy and healthy. The following is an investigation of important constructs in the development of academically successful and mentally healthy children, and the parenting characteristics that correlate with them. Academic achievement has long been used as a measuring stick for success. Parents go to great lengths to ensure that their children succeed in school. From private tutors, to ACT study courses, to lengthy parent-teacher conferences, many parents see the value of investing in their children’s education. Parents are so concerned with increasing the academic success of their children that the private tutor industry in the United States has exceeded $5 billion (Gordon, Morgan, Ponticell, & O’Malley, 2008). However, these services are not equally accessible across socio-economic boundaries. How then, might all parents modify their own behaviors to facilitate the academic success of their children? Researchers have found this to be an important and relevant question and have sought to discover the ways in which parents may increase the likelihood of their children achieving high Grade Point Averages (GPAs) and standardized test scores. Understanding the parenting behaviors that correlate to these higher scores may lead parents to better equip their children for academic success. Above all, parents often state that they want their children to be happy. Anxiety disorders, the most common psychological disorders in children and adolescents (Beidel, 1991), ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, WORRY, PERSONALITY, AND PARENTING Kaufling 4 can greatly disrupt this goal. Feelings of anxiety are consistently found to correlate negatively with subjective happiness (e.g., Ebrahimi, Ghasmian, & D’Souza, 2008; Warnecke, Baum, Peer, & Goreczny, 2014) and positively with depression (e.g., Warnecke, Baum, Peer, & Goreczny, 2014). Psychologists and other professionals seek to better understand anxiety by investigating what occurs simultaneously with it. One goal of the current study was to enhance understanding of what parenting behaviors are associated with higher levels of anxiety, and its cognitive component (worry), in children. Knowing this information may help parents on their mission to foster mentally healthy children and could someday lead to knowledge that might help to reduce the ever-increasing number of anxiety diagnoses. Finally, when investigating these constructs, it is important to also consider how they interact with each other. For example, if one parenting behavior correlates positively with academic achievement, but also positively with anxiety, a dilemma is created. Those offering advice on best parenting practices in relation to academic achievement and anxiety must first understand what, if any, relationship exists between academic achievement and anxiety alone. These associations can inform research in relation to parenting, and perhaps more importantly, inform the ethics of applications and implications from the results. Parenting Dimensions Within the developmental literature, and particularly considering the contributions from parenting research, studies commonly assess parenting by grouping parents into one of three, sometimes four, distinct parenting styles. Outlined in seminal research by Diana Baumrind are the four styles (i.e., permissive, authoritative, authoritarian, and neglectful). Permissive parents are those who are warm and high in responsiveness but are very lenient and non-controlling (Baumrind, 1966). Parents practicing the authoritative style are again warm and highly ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, WORRY, PERSONALITY, AND PARENTING Kaufling 5 responsive but are stricter with discipline and often democratic in decision and rule-making (Baumrind, 1966). Authoritarian parents are strict with discipline and highly controlling but lack the warmth and acceptance of authoritative parents (Baumrind, 1966). Finally, neglectful parents are those who are both uninvolved and relatively unresponsive to their children (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). While these distinct styles have been frequently used in developmental psychology research for decades, they can force parents into molds that they may not fit. For instance, there is no allowance for a parent to be a little bit authoritarian, but also neglectful sometimes. Also, Baumrind’s styles were developed after studying only American families, and most research surrounding them is primarily focused on European American populations (Hock, 2014). Parenting styles are often influenced by culture, so it is quite possible that these four styles do not adequately describe non-European-American parents (Saleem, Mahmood, & Daud, 2017). Additionally, these definitive parenting styles were developed more than 50 years ago (Baumrind, 1966; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Society as a whole has changed significantly in the last five decades, yet the parenting divisions have remained the same in the psychological literature. It is hard to imagine that, with the changes to social culture and family structure, as well as technological and educational advances since 1966, parenting has not evolved as well. In accordance with these flaws in much of the existing literature, this study seeks to evaluate parenting in terms of dimensions, rather than strict styles. Parenting dimensions allow parents to fall along a continuum, rather than forcing them into constricting categories that may not accurately represent their general behavioral patterns and styles of parenting. Only recently have these problems been recognized as enough to require a change in thinking. Psychological research is just beginning to shift toward dimensional or domain-specific models of parenting, ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, WORRY, PERSONALITY, AND PARENTING Kaufling 6 allowing for a more multifaceted and situationally determined view of parenting (Smetana, 2017). Academic Achievement and Parenting Dimensions While there have been many studies on the associations of school-specific parenting behaviors, such as parental involvement in school volunteering and parent organizations, and communication with teachers, and children’s academic success (Fan & Chen, 2001; Hill & Tyson, 2009), less research has focused on general parenting and how it may correlate with academic performance. The current study seeks to diverge from much existing literature by focusing on the general parenting dimensions of warmth and control. Parental warmth involves being emotionally available to and supportive of one’s children, expressing love and kindness toward them, as well as showing appreciation and affection (Skinner, Johnson, & Snyder, 2005). The conceptual opposite of warmth is rejection, characterized by hostility and aversion (Skinner, Johnson, & Snyder, 2005). Parental control can be considered a combination of overprotection and psychological and behavioral control, characterized by behaviors such as prohibiting the child from disagreeing with the parent or making their own decisions, constantly needing to know what the child is doing, and babying or making the child feel dependent on the parent (Parker, Tupling, & Brown, 1979; Skinner, Johnson, & Snyder, 2005). With the use of more inclusive dimensions, and a recent meta-analysis conclusion that parenting is of the most important factors affecting academic achievement (Masud, Thurasamy, & Ahmad, 2015), research on correlations between parenting and academic achievement have become increasingly accurate and important. A 2016 meta-analysis including over 350,000 participants found that “better academic achievement was associated with high levels of parental responsiveness”, which