Parenting behaviours and adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment

The paper presents the results of an extensive study with 748 Singapore adolescents on their perceptions of their parents' child-rearing behaviours and the relationship to the adolescents' psychosocial adjustment. The study looked at three key dimensions of fathers' and mothers' parenting behaviours: warmth, control and communication, as well as important areas of adolescent psychosocial well being: personal self-concept, emotional well being, autonomy development, and social efficacy. The findings revealed that adolescents perceived mothers to be the more nurturant and supportive parent. Correlational analysis indicated that fathers' and mothers' parenting behaviours were significantly linked to all measures of psychosocial adjustment, with stronger associations with mother's parenting behaviours. The differential outcomes reflect the different types of relationship that adolescents have with their fathers and mothers. INTRODUCTION Two dimensions of parenting behaviours support/responsivienes (warmth, reciprocity, and attachment) and control (coerciveness, confrontation, monitoring, supervision , consistent discipline and corporal punishment) have been repeatedly identified in parent-child research has important in accounting for parents' influences on children (references). Parental warmth is found to be highly facilitative in the development of many desirable characteristics of Gender Differences and Ethnicity Issues in Parenting in an Asian Context http://publications.aare. edu.au/00pap/ong00466.htm[23/4/2013 11:21:37 AM] adolescents, including high self-esteem, cognitive development, and general psychological adjustment (Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Rollins & Thomas, 1979), whereas a lack of parental social support and affection is found to impede the development of feelings of security, trust, and positive orientation toward others (Bowlby,1969). Parental control is also linked to adolescent functioning though much more weakly than parental warmth (Thomas, Gecas, Weigert, & Rooney, 1974). Baumrind (1971) noted that the degree and kind of control exercised by parents are related to many and subtle differences among children. Inadequate supervision and a low level of parent-involvement are important contributions to poor adjustment in elementary school-aged and young adolescent boys (Capaldi & Patterson, 1991). Equally, too, controlling families may also put children at risk from peer pressures (Fuligni & Eccles, 1993). In contrast, autonomy support is positively associated with outcomes such as self-regulation, school motivation and social development (Steinberg, Elmen, & Mounts, 1989; Yee & Flanagan, 1985). Crouter and colleagues (1990) however, argued that at any point in the life span of a child there are likely to be optimal levels of parental monitoring, depending on the child's circumstance. This suggests that even positive forms of control such as parental monitoring may not be equally effective at different periods in a child's life. Yet another factor that has been identified as critical in the adolescent's development is the quality of intrafamilial communication. Adequate parental communication is positively correlated with the individual and social adjustment of the adolescent and negatively correlated with deviant or delinquent attitudes, and drug abuse (e.g. Barnes & Farrell, 1992; Farell & Barnes, 1993, Sorosiak, Thomas & Balet, 1976). Findings on parent-adolescent relationships have been drawn predominantly from Western sample. Only recently have variations in ideologies and goals regarding childbearing in different ethnic groups, as well as resultant socialization strategies and family interaction patterns been the subject of considerable discussion (Coll, 1990, Ogbu, 1981). There are some recent studies on Asian cultures, but these tend to focus on Chinese mothers' parenting practices in American contexts (Chao, 1994; Gorman, 1998) and their impact on school achievement (e.g. Chen & Utal, 1988). There has been no study comparing fathers' and mothers' parenting behaviours and how these are related to the psychological well being of the adolescents. This study focused on parenting behaviours on three dimension: warmth, control and communication -and how adolescents' perception of fathers' and mothers' specific parenting behaviours are linked to key psychosocial outcomes. METHOD Subjects The subjects were 748 post-secondary students drawn from the initial sample of 1008 adolescents. Ages of the sample participants ranged from 16 to 19 years, with a mean age of 17.8. Measures Subjects completed a questionnaire in which they describe their relationship with their fathers and mothers separately. Parenting behaviours were measured by: (1) parental warmth, (2) parental control, (3) parental communication with adolescents. Parental warmth scale measured adolescents' perception of the extent to which they experience their father/mother as loving, intimate and expressive of affection in words and actions, as well as the extent adolescents' perception of father/mother as providing emotional and resource support, and their involvement in their everyday life. The parental control scales measure the specific means through which parents influence adolescent outcomes. Negative parenting was measured by three subscales: parental strictness, parental inconsistency, coercive control and psychological control. Positive parenting was assessed by autonomy support and induction method. Parent-adolescent communication was measured by openness in communication with father/mother and the quality of affect in the parent-child communication. Psychological well being was indexed by personal self-concept, emotional well being, and personal autonomy, while social efficacy measures adolescents' perceptions of their ability to relate to peers and the ability to relate to adults. To examine the extent of differences in adolescents' perception of their relationship with father and mother, t-tests Gender Differences and Ethnicity Issues in Parenting in an Asian Context http://publications.aare. edu.au/00pap/ong00466.htm[23/4/2013 11:21:37 AM] were performed. Pearson Correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the relationship between parenting behaviour and adolescent adjustment variables. Motherand father-adolescent relationships were studied separately because research has shown that relationships with mothers and fathers may be differentially associated with adolescent adjustment (Allen, Hauser, Bell, & Connor, 1994; Bell & Bell, 1983).