Australian Parenting and Adolescent Boys’ and Girls’ Academic Performance and Mastery: The Mediating Effect of Perceptions of Parenting and Sense of School Membership

Abstract

This study contributes to the understanding of how parenting relates to adolescents' academic outcomes. This study tested the hypothesis that parenting behaviours, including parental warmth, anger, consistency and self-efficacy, are related to adolescents' academic performance and mastery, and that this relationship is mediated by adolescent boys' and girls' perceptions of parenting and their sense of school membership in different ways. Multigroup nested structural equation models were built using the data obtained from Wave 5 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Four measures of parenting behaviours, adolescents' perception of parenting behaviour, adolescents' sense of school membership and their academic performance and mastery were obtained from 1926 boys and 1850 girls and their parents to test this study's hypotheses. The path models showed that girls' perceptions of parenting played a more explicit role in affecting their academic performance and mastery compared to boys. Furthermore, parenting behaviours were mediated by boys' and girls' sense of school membership, as influenced by their perceptions of parenting, in predicting their mastery and performance orientations, though the effects were quite different. The results suggest the roles played by parents in contributing to their children's schooling and academic performance somewhat differ between boys and girls.

Parenting style as a predictor of dietary score change in children from 4 to 14 years of age. Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

“…Therefore, it is possible that the warmth dimension may create a highly responsive environment in the home where children are able to indulge in unhealthy foods (56) . This is a new finding in the literature and warrants further research using measures that allow for further variability in the responses to allow for the nuances of parenting to be explored (57) .…”

Exploring how adolescent boys' and girls' internalizing and externalizing behaviors impact parental self‐efficacy: A vignette study

“…Similarly, Glatz and Buchanan (2015b) found that parents of young adolescent boys reported higher levels of PSE than parents of young adolescent girls, although this effect became nonsignificant when other variables (i.e., puberty, behavior) were controlled. Two other studies (Babskie et al, 2017; Carless et al, 2015) reported no differences in PSE as a function of the adolescents’ sex, and in one final study, parents of adolescent girls reported higher levels of PSE than parents of boys (Phillipson & McFarland, 2016). Thus, it is not yet clear if and how parents differ in their PSE as a function of the child's sex because there are few studies on this topic, and existing studies have shown mixed results.…”