Parenting Styles Literature Review

Parenting Styles Literature Review Name Institution Date Parenting styles vary in relation to different factors such as culture, socio-economic status, and geopolitical affiliations. Parenting styles have different impacts on the children in terms of their social wellbeing. Several studies have been conducted on the impacts of the authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles on the academic achievement. The direct relationship between the two variables, authoritative parenting style and academic performance, is an important area of study. However, there are different findings regarding the variation of the relationship across cultures. Chao (2001) and Park and Bauer (2002) are two of the extensive studies previously carried out to investigate the relationship of authoritative parenting style and academic achievement across cultures. Some studies indicate that the authoritative parenting style boosts the academic performance of a child while others state that authoritarian style lowers academic achievement of the children. The special link among all parenting styles is attributed to the behaviour of the parents and the social setup of the relationship. For instance, it is stated that the parenting style that conforms to being supportive, warm, accepting, and with high but appropriate strictness exacerbates high academic achievement. This implies that the nature of the social environment greatly impacts on the wellbeing of the children in terms of their academic achievements. However, they vary across cultures; thus, the observable differences among the different racial backgrounds. Park and Bauer (2002) investigated how the relationship between parenting styles and academic achievement in four ethnic groups. The authors studied the parenting styles of the Asian Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, and European Americans. The independent variables used in the study were strictness, supervision, involvement, and acceptance against the dependent variable academic achievement. The study found the relationship between parenting styles and academic achievement to be statistically significant for the four groups. The strengths of the association between parenting styles and academic achievement were 9.1%, 5.5%, 4.4% and 2.1% for European Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans, respectively (Park & Bauer, 2002). The study also concluded that the authoritarian style is associated with higher academic achievement than the authoritarian style. The European Americans showed more authoritarian parenting styles as compared to the other three ethnic groups, which implies that the European American children perform better academically compared to their Hispanic and African American counterparts. The stepwise regression that was conducted by Park and Bauer (2002) offers new evidence to suggest inconsistencies in the relationship between parenting styles and academic achievement of students. The study found that that the Asian Americans were strict and usually supervised their children. The study found that supervision parenting practices impacted significant improvement on the academic achievement for Asian Americans. For the other ethnic groups, the study discovered that accepting parenting among the European American led to significant academic achievement while strictness among the Hispanics boosted academic achievement. Therefore, according to the evidence, it can be concluded that the parenting styles vary across cultures and have different effects on academic achievement. The growing study on the influence of parenting styles on academic achievement has also been contributed by Chao (2001). The study is in congruence with Park and Bauer (2002) as it studies the parenting styles of European Americans and Asian Americans and their impacts on academic achievement of the children. The study by Chao (200) investigated how parent-adolescents relationships affect school performance. The study recaptures the concept that parenting styles are the emotional environments between parents and their children, therefore, placing the adolescents in the mix provides room for influencing behaviour in adolescents, which directly influences their academic achievement. The relationships between family members specifically are the reflections of specific cultures. Therefore, parenting styles are seen as the right indicators that reflect culture as evidenced in numerous studies (Chao, 2001). Chao (2001) used a sample of Chinese Americans and European Americans in the 9th through the 12th grade. The samples were drawn from 7 high schools in Los Angeles. The study found that a large number of Chinese Americans performed better than their European American counterparts. Most of the European American adolescents rated their parents as authoritative while the Chinese Americans rated their parents as authoritarian. The author introduced the closeness variable in the other generations of the Chinese Americans and European Americans to determine the new dimensions of the impacts of authoritative and authoritarian styles on the adolescents. The new findings indicated that the European Americans with authoritative parents performed better than their Chinese American counterparts from the authoritarian families. However, these findings could not be justified for first and second generation. This group showed no differences in school grades. The evidence proves that relationship closeness, when applied together with the authoritative style, has a positive impact on the academic achievement of the students. Therefore, since the European Americans show high percentages of closeness, their authoritative approach works better than the authoritarian style without closeness. Chao (2001) is a great contribution to the existing literature on the relationships in families and the parental styles used in these families and how they differ across cultures. The issue of familial relationships and the associated parenting styles among the different cultures has been studied far and wide. Specifically, various studies have been conducted on the impacts of the two prominent parenting styles of authoritarian and authoritative. Although there are inconsistent findings, most studies indicate that the authoritarian style is applied by European Americans as compared to their Hispanic, African American, and Asian American counterparts. Together with variables such as strictness, supervision, involvement, and acceptance, the authoritarian parenting style has been shown to improve the academic achievement of children. It is a parenting style that is mostly applicable in the European Americans as they consider family closeness as the best attribute of parenting. They are more likely to impact the performance of their children as compared to the Asians and Hispanics with the use of the authoritative parenting styles. Therefore, there are various occasions among the cultures that trigger the different parenting styles in the different cultures from the different parts of the world. References Chao, R. K. (2001). Extending research on the consequences of parenting style for Chinese Americans and European Americans. Child Development, 72, 1832–1843. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00381 Park, H.-S., & Bauer, S. (2002). Parenting practices, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and academic achievement in adolescents. School Psychology International, 23, 386–396. doi:10.1177/0143034302234002