THE ‘PARENT’ IN THE PARENTING STYLE: A CORRELATIONAL STUDY EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF PARENTING ON SELF-CONCEPT OF THE ADOLESCENT (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The present research attempts to explore the dynamics of parent child relationship. The investigation aims at understanding the impact of parenting style and its correlates such as personality, life satisfaction and self-esteem on the self-concept of the adolescent. A sample of 50 parents through purposive sampling was selected and evaluated on standardized measures of parenting styles, personality factors, self-esteem and life satisfaction. The adolescent child of the same parent was evaluated on standardized measure of self-concept. Statistical treatment of data involved descriptive statistics and drawing correlations to explore the relationship between parenting styles and its impact on self-concept. Qualitative insights into the data were gained through personal interviews with the participants. Overview of results indicated authoritative parenting style and agreeableness as strong antecedent of self-concept with conscientiousness and openness to experience strongly mediating authoritative parenting style. Life satisfaction and self-esteem exerted moderating effects on the self-concept of adolescent. Independent enrichment modules for parents, teachers and adolescents were designed to facilitate the self-concept of adolescent. In conclusion, parent child relationship dynamics revealed the imperativeness of ‘parent’ in the parenting style with robust impact on the sense of ‘self’ and well-being of the child. OBJECTIVE • To explore the relationship between dominant parenting style and self-concept of the adolescent • To explore the relationship between dominant personality type and with self-concept of the adolescent • To explore the relationship between self-esteem of the parent and the self-concept of the adolescent • To explore the relationship between life satisfaction of the parents and the self-concept of the adolescent • To assess the parenting styles of working and non- working parents and see its impact on the self-concept of the child • To prepare a parent enrichment program module as an effective intervention for low self-concept adolescents METHODS The data collection for the present study was carried out in three sessions after recognizing suitable participants in accordance with the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The researcher asked all of them whether they were comfortable taking part in the research or not and assured them that they could leave it in between if they wanted to. This was followed by the first session wherein the researcher tried to explain briefly what the study was about and also tried to answer some of the questions the participants had in their minds. This facilitated a good rapport between the participants and the researcher and helped in the semi-structured interview which followed trying to understand the parent in terms of her own preferences, attitudes and perceptions regarding her experience of being a parent which helped the researcher gain insights into the world of parenting and parenting behaviour as it exists in day to day life. In the second session, the parents were administered four scales namely the Parenting Style Four Factor Questionnaire (PS-FFQ), Big Five Inventory (BFI), Life Satisfaction Scale and Rosenberg’s Self Esteem Scale (RSES) one after the other with an interval period of 5 minutes between each one of them. Clear instructions were given to them before they started to fill in Atheir responses and any query that they had with regard to a particular question was addressed by the researcher who was sitting near the participant throughout the scales’ administration. There was no time limit but the participants took 15 minutes to finish the PS- FFQ, BFI and Life Satisfaction Scale and about 10 minutes for completing Rosenberg’s Self Esteem scale. In the third session, an informal conversation was held with the adolescents of the parent participants to make them feel comfortable and establish a rapport. This was followed by administering them the Self Concept Inventory developed by Saraswat in order to assess their concept of self. They were given clear instructions as to how they have to respond to the question items and were assured that their responses would be confidential and if the need be, the responses would be presented in aggregate forms only. Soon after a five minute break, a casual and short interview was conducted with the child wherein the researcher tried to explore the parent child dynamic as well as tries to learn more about the parenting process and practices. The study was carried out in two phases wherein the participants were first administered the scales selected to assess their parenting styles, personality factors, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation was then used to explore the relationship between these characteristics of the parent and the self-concept of their adolescent. In order to assess the direction and strength the relationship which exists between these variables, the Pearson correlation engendered a correlational coefficient r, which helped the researcher to understand the dynamics between parental variables and adolescent’s self-concept within the range of -1 to +1. Thus, with the help of bivariate correlations, the association between the same were found. RESULTS It was found that parental variables like parenting styles, personality factors, self-esteem and life satisfaction of a parent interact with each other and have an association with the self-concept of their adolescent. The correlations between these variables were calculated with the help of the software -Statistical Package for Social Sciences (spss) which helped the researcher to calculate bivariate correlations as well as helped flag the levels of significance. Authoritarian parenting was found to be negatively correlated with personality facets like extroversion (-0.166) conscientiousness (-0.178) and specially agreeableness (-3.19**) whose value of correlation was found to be significant. In similar fashion, it was negatively correlated with the self-esteem and life satisfaction of the individual as well as the self-concept of his child (-0.14). An interesting observation was that the correlation between authoritarian and uninvolved parenting style was high (0.445**).Authoritative parenting style was significantly positively correlated with the self-concept of the adolescent and surprisingly had a good correlation with permissive style of parenting as well. It resonated positively with personality characteristics like agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, neuroticism, as well as dimensions of life satisfaction and self-esteem. Permissive parenting style was significantly correlated with the self-concept of the adolescent (0.330*) as well as the uninvolved style of parenting (0.356*). It was positively correlated with extroversion, neuroticism and openness to experience and negatively correlated with personality factors of conscientiousness and agreeableness as well as self-esteem of the parent participant. The uninvolved parenting style was negatively correlated with aspects of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism as well as the self-esteem. The variable of self-esteem proved to be of immense help to the researcher while discussing the results as it was found that self-esteem was negatively correlated with authoritarian, permissive and uninvolved parenting styles as well as neuroticism. the results demonstrate, in case of working mothers, the strongest correlation between the self concept of the adolescent and the parenting style adopted by mothers were in the case of permissive ( r = .691**) and authoritative ( r = .651**) followed by uninvolved ( r = 0.008) and authoritarian parenting style ( r = -.076). The authoritarian style of parenting in case of working mothers was found to be negatively correlated with the self-concept of the adolescent (r =-.076) while amongst mothers who stayed at home it had a negligible influence on the same (r = 0.050). Surprisingly in the case of stay mothers who adopted the uninvolved parenting style, its correlation with the self-concept of the adolescent was most positive (r = .331) in comparison to permissive (r =.141), authoritative (r =.255) and authoritarian (r = 0.050). Another interesting outcome of the analysis was that in case of working mothers, there was a significant correlation between the authoritarian parenting style and uninvolved style of parenting (r =.549*) as well as uninvolved style of parenting (r =.412* ). It can also be seen that the parenting styles of working mothers are known to have a more significant correlation with the self-concept of the adolescent. CONCLUSIONS The purpose of the present study was to understand the significance of individual characteristics of ‘parents’ in the parenting process, in the adoption of parenting styles and the self-concept of the adolescent. The objectives of the study primarily focused on understanding the dynamics between styles of parenting adopted by parents and its relationship with aspects of personality, life satisfaction, self-esteem of the parent and how the same influenced the adolescent’s self-worth. Hypothesis testing is imperative in research and in the present research also several hypotheses were formulated with respect to the dominant parenting and personality type, which personality factors would be most likely associated with the different styles of parenting and most importantly what factors would contribute to the self-concept of the adolescent children. Statistical analysis included drawing correlations among variables and qualitative insights were gained through personal interviews with both parent as well as adolescent participants. It was found that the authoritative parenting style, trait of openness to experience and elevated levels of life satisfaction were significantly and positively correlated with the self-concept of the adolescent. To facilitate the sense of self in the child dependent on the parents and teachers, parent-teacher- student enrichment programs were proposed. To sum up, it can be ascertained that the parent – adolescent relationship governed by the ‘parent’ in parenting is of utmost relevance contributing to the plethora of research in the developmental field.