Parenting Styles and Its Effect on Self-Esteem of Adolescents

This study primarily aims at assessing and studying the parenting styles and its effect on the self-esteem of adolescents, specifically in Indian context. ‘Parenting styles’ are of four main types which are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and neglectful parenting style. Three main styles out of these namely authoritarian, authoritative and permissive style of parenting have been kept as the focus of this study to assess their effect on the self-esteem of adolescents since both theoretically and practically it has always been documented and proved that the neglectful approach of parents always negatively impact the children and adolescents’ factors related to their ‘self’, therefore it is not kept in the inclusion criteria for this study. The selected sample for this study consisted of a total of 120 participants (60 female and 60 male) adolescents selected from Delhi and NCR in India, the age range kept as 16-18years (with no mental and physical disability, regular school going adolescents, with nearly same socio-economic background and only those from unbroken nuclear families with mothers who were homemakers). The findings showed that there is no significant difference between permissive and authoritative parenting both in case of mothers’ and fathers’ parenting on the self-esteem of adolescents and both these styles of parenting mostly results in higher self-esteem among adolescents as compared to authoritarian style of parenting which is found to have a significant negative correlation with the self-esteem of adolescents. Also, not much difference is found between the self-esteem levels of male and female adolescents in present times in urban Indian context.