Parenting Styles

There are so many evidence to prove that parenting style can directly affect their child academic achievement and a higher parenting authoritativeness can lead to a better academic result than a higher authoritarianism parenting style (Kordi & Baharudin, 2010). In general, there are four types of parenting style, authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and uninvolved, which associate with how parent support their child and how high their demand is. This essay is going to analysis how parenting style associated with academic achievement and is there any cross culture phenomenon appear nowadays by mainly focus on “Authoritative” and “Authoritarianism” and give a couple examples to support this idea.

According to Baumrind (1967,1973), cited in Ayele (2012, p. 28), an authoritative parenting style has showed the balance of the response and demand of parent to their child, not only an order or command. In authoritative parenting style, parent and their can make a reciprocal relationship involve a bidirectional communication. Parents will guide their child in rational, persuade and discipline through a reasoning way. Baumrind (1967,1973), cited in Ayele (2012, p. 28) also state that those parents who follow this kind of parenting style can understand the important of child independency and they will let their child to make most of the reasoning decision. The advantages of this parenting style can increase the children’s self-esteem and also they can feel supportive of their parents. According to Multon (1991) and Schunk (1999), cited in ayele (2012, p. 42) research, a high academic achievement is related to the motivation and encouragement of parent because the children can cultivate self-regulation and become more motivate in learning thus to get a good result. A lot of example had showed that parenting style is a cross culture issue because parenting style are being well promoted in different countries. The European country, for example America, generally this country is more open minded they know what their child want, so they can have a good communication with their child and provide them a support, base on those research a higher academic achievement is always base on the relationship between parent and children, therefore the European can get a better result in academic than the Chinese (Kordi & Baharudin, 2010).

Compare to the Western, Chinese oversea children always shows a bad attitude in studying, they only aim for pass but not a higher grade. This phenomenon appeared is because the Chinese parent are more likely to use authoritarian parenting style in teaching. According to Baumrind (1967,1973), cited in Ayele (2012, p. 28), an authoritarian parenting style is characterized by low support and high demand. This kind of parent usually want to control their children to follow their rules and restrict their life in order to give them an idea which is children have to obey their parent, showing them “who is the real boss” a kind of power-assertive. Living under this atmosphere, children will become unhappy, helpless and low self-esteem. For recent years, two words “tiger mother” and “Monster parent” had born in Asia, some people use animal and monster to describe parent, to show how horror of their parent are. These word is adapted from the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” written by Amy Chua, a traditional Chinese woman who use authoritarian parenting style to raise two western children and finally get a high achievement in academic and other aspect, according to this example the authoritarian Asian American can also have better result than the European American.