Parenting styles and their impact on children’s academic self-concept, behavioural problems and executive functions

Abstract

Parental styles have a significant impact on children’s developmental outcomes. It could be argued that negative parenting characteristics, including strictness, neglect, control, punishment, and lack of support potentially impact child academic self-concept, behavioural problems as well as child’s cognitive abilities. The current thesis examines this question in Kurdish primary school children.
This thesis comprises 6 chapters: Chapter 1 and 2 consist of an introduction and literature review about the topic. Chapter 3 reports study 1 which examines parenting styles and their relationship with academic self-concept and behavioural problems. This chapter also considers whether academic self-concept serves as a mediator in the relationship between parenting styles and behavioural problems. In support of previous studies, results indicate a vital role of parenting styles on children’s academic self-concept and behavioural problems among Kurdish children. The results also indicate that academic self-concept serves as a significant mediator in the relationship between parenting styles with prosocial behaviour and internalising problems.
Chapter 4 reports study 2, which is an intervention study. This study tests the impact of Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP) programme to improve parenting styles and decrease parental stress. After three months a follow-up study was carried out in order to examine the effectiveness of the STEP programme. It was found that the intervention was effective in promoting parenting styles and reducing the level of parental stress in Kurdish mothers. The follow-up study showed that the changes were sustained over a three months period. However, contrary to expectation, no significant statistical differences were found in academic self-concept and behavioural problems between children whose mothers attended STEP and others whose mothers did not attend.
Chapter 5 reports study 3 in which the individual differences in executive functions based on the parental monitoring and hyperactivity expressed by children was investigated. Additionally, a moderating role of parental monitoring in the relationship between children’s executive function and hyperactivity was performed in this study. Results indicated that children subjected to poor parental monitoring and showing a high level of hyperactivity had difficulties in inhibitory control, accuracy, processing speed and task persistence compared with the matched sample. PROCESS analysis indicated a significant moderating role of parental monitoring in the association between accuracy, verbal inhibition and task persistence with hyperactivity.
The last chapter, Chapter 6, summarizes the findings of the empirical studies and provides the discussion, conclusion, limitations, implications and suggestions for future research.