Frontiers in Educational Research, 2024, 7(6); doi: 10.25236/FER.2024.070601.
Kexin Feng1, Michael Gaffney2
1Higher Education Development Centre, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand
2College of Education, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand
In the past decade, numerous scholars and educationalists have highlighted the importance of parenting style and its influence on the learning outcomes of children. Parents are commonly the first caregivers that children know and grow up with, and thus, it is expected that the parenting style they adopt profoundly influences their child’s future development. This research focuses on investigating the relationship between authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting styles and student academic achievement from the perspectives of recent secondary-school graduates in Beijing, China. This study adopted a mixed-methods research approach by using a sequential exploratory design, including both quantitative and qualitative research phases. Although the quantitative results revealed that there was no direct relationship between parenting styles and student academic achievement, the qualitative findings provided evidence for how authoritarian parenting styles could have a mixed influence on student school performance in the Chinese cultural context. The findings also suggest that Chinese authoritarian parents could be considerate and caring within a flexible parental authority, which may often be misunderstood. This research recommends that further exploration of parenting styles in the context of different cultural backgrounds to check its wider construct/content validity.
Parenting Styles, Student Academic Achievement, Secondary School Graduates, Chinese Parenting, Mixed-Methods Research
Kexin Feng, Michael Gaffney. Parenting styles and student academic achievement: An exploration among secondary-school graduates in Beijing, China. Frontiers in Educational Research (2024) Vol. 7, Issue 6: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2024.070601.
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