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The Influence Of Parenting Styles On Social Adjustment Among Secondary School Students
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CHAPTER ONE
1.1Introduction
The study of human development is
centrally concerned with understanding the processes that lead adults to
function adequately within their cultures. These skills include an
understanding of and adherence to the moral standards, conventional
rules, and customs of the society. They also include maintaining close
relationships with others, developing the skills to work productively,
and becoming self-reliant and able to function independently. All of
these may be important to successfully rear the next generation.
Researchers studying human development have assumed that the family is a
particularly important context for developing these competencies, and
therefore, they have examined how parents socialize their children to
understand variations in adult outcomes. They have attempted to find
associations between the way parents raise their children and children’s
social, emotional and cognitive development.
It has been assumed
that variations in parents’ discipline style, warmth, attention to the
needs of the child and parenting attitudes and beliefs all can be
characterized in terms of consistent patterns of child-rearing, referred
to as a parenting styles, that are systematically related to children’s
competence and development. Research that began in the mid-1980s has
focused more on the particular dimensions of parenting that underlie the
different parenting styles to provide a more detailed understanding of
how parenting influences healthy child and adolescent development.
Arnolds
(2002) theorized that a child tends to behave in the society as they
were brought up or reared by their parents. The social adjustment of
individual adolescent depends on the way and manner he/she is brought.
According to Dike (2003), styles of parenting in the home affects their
children’s social orientation in the larger society. A child cannot
behave contrary to how he/she is nurtured by the parents/guardians. Dike
(2003) is of the opinion that children behave according to the pattern
of parental leadership styles. For instance, a child who is brought up
through an authoritarian way of parenting, will in most cases, exhibit
aggression to his/her peers, and show an attitude of strong reliance on
the authority of the adult members of the society. Also a child tend to
show excellence in knowledge, well informed and directed when he is
brought up by the authoritative parenting style, while he/she could be
wayward, rascal, or join the area boy or area girl group if he/she is
nurtured by parents who are permissive in their style of parenting; and a
child who is reared or brought up by the harmonious parenting style,
will relate well in the society with his/her age mates, even with
adults. This child who is brought up by the harmonious parents shows
good interactions and cordial relationship with those who live near
him/her. He/she is not hostile and does not easily break the norms and
laid down rules in the society or the community where he lives.
In
his early years a child passes through various phases in his relations
with others. A young child is essentially tremendous egocentric. He sees
himself as the center of the universe. He is a person to be served and
waited upon, a person with little patience for anything which blocks his
desire or sense of security. He is, above all, a person who has small
regard and less appreciation of the rights or feelings of others so long
as he himself is served and has his way. Some individuals seem never to
lose their egocentric attitude entirely, perhaps because of faulty
upbringing or because of unusual environmental circumstances (Rice,
2001).
But the progress of true maturity may be measured in part by
an individual’s growing awareness of and interest in, other persons,
together with an appreciation of their rights and desires and a
willingness to subordinate personal wishes to the greater good of the
greater number. Expanding the child’s social consciousness as he moves
toward maturity is an important training problem. The outcome represents
the difference between a “spoiled disagreeable, poorly adjusted child
and a likable youngster who is finding acceptable social adjustments.
1.2Theoretical Background to the Study
1.2.1Theories of Parenting Styles
Baldwin
and his colleagues (2000) provided one of the most important early
attempts to describe systematic patterns of child rearing. This research
conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, followed a group of children and
their families longitudinally cover time. They observed parents and
children interacting together in their homes, and they also assessed
progress in children’s development at different ages. They identified
two sets of parental childbearing dimensions that were related to
differences in children’s outcomes. As others had done, they
distinguished parents along a dimension of emotional involvement versus
detachment. They also distinguished between democratic and autocratic
parents. Autocratic parents were more likely to simply hand down their
rules, while democratic parents were more likely to involve the child in
family decision-making and provide explanations for their expectations.
Their research demonstrated that democratic parents had children who
were less hostile and who worked more effectively in the absence of
adult supervision (Maccoby, 1992, Maccoby and Martin, 1993).
There
have been many subsequent attempts to improve on Baldwin’s descriptions
of parenting styles. The most influential has been the research of Diana
(2002) who believed that the democratic style as defined by Baldwin was
not sufficient to produce culturally competent adults and that
democracy must be combined with authority to produce optimal competence.
Beginning in the 1960s, Baumrind identified a set of characteristics
that she believed defined competence for children in North American
society (Stone, 1991), and then she examined parents’ childrearing
beliefs and practices to determine the parenting styles that were
associated with those outcomes. She initially developed a typology of
child outcomes, but research from 1990 onward has expanded to include
four distinct parenting styles such as authoritarian, authoritative,
permissive and harmonious.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of parenting styles on social adjustment among secondary school students in Lagos Metropolis. To achieve this goal, the researcher formulated four hypotheses to guide the study.There is a significant influence of authoritative parenting style on student’s social adjustment.There is a significant influence of religious background on the parenting style of couples.There is a significant influence of ethnicity on parenting style among ... Continue reading---
