Academic Performance of Adolescents and School

Grade point averages (GPA) is another important indicator in academic achievement and can be a major decision factor for opportunities, such as being accepted into the college of choice, obtaining an internship or even getting hired for a summer job. Different parenting styles can influence GPAs in different ways. For example, one study reported that adolescents that live in more authoritative homes are more likely to have higher GPAs than those of non-authoritative. Authoritative households contribute to healthy psychological development and school success by granting autonomy and demonstrating warmth and acceptance.

These types of parent behaviors allow adolescents to learn under a healthy environment, which can overall improve their academics.

On the contrary, students who have parents that are more authoritarian and more permissive are more likely to receive lower GPAs. For example, one study looked at parenting styles and academic outcomes across Asian-Americans and Euro-Americans subgroups, and found that both groups reported lower GPAs when they came from more authoritarian and permissive families.

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These research results indicate that even across cultures, parents that are disengaged or do not set and enforce rules are potentially setting their children up for academic failure. It is quite clear that if parents want to prevent these negative academic outcomes, they should engage with their children by displaying a healthy balance of supportive and demanding behaviors.

Parent styles influence their children’s academic achievement through mediating factors, like self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one’s ability to perform and successfully complete tasks, and plays a crucial role in academic achievement.

One study found that students from authoritative families reported significantly higher self-efficacy beliefs as compared to those of authoritarian and permissive. Authoritative parents value their children’s education by providing an encouraging environment where they can communicate and demonstrate their skills effectively. Students who perceived that their parents value their education develop high expectations and high self-efficacy toward their educational endeavors. Students with higher self-efficacy are more likely to have higher GPAs. A good reason for this could be that the more a student believes they can succeed, the more likely they will. Additionally, students who have higher self-efficacy tend to set more educational goals and are more likely to attain them.

Students must be motivated and have genuine interest to set goals and accomplish them, so it can be suggested that their strong interest and goal setting will most likely impact their GPAs and overall improve their academic achievement. Parenting styles can influence the achievement strategies that children engage in to help them overcome academic challenges. The strategies at which adolescents use to help them in their academics can be adaptive or maladaptive depending on which behaviors they engage in. Maladaptive strategies can be described as students who expect failure, engage in less task-relevant behavior, and refrain from using self-enhancing attributions. The alternative being adaptive strategies, including optimistic expectations, high task involvement, persistence, and mastery beliefs.

Maladaptive strategies can be extremely unhealthy, and when students engage in these types of behaviors, they are more likely to have lower academic performance. It is important that parent’s help their children develop more adaptive skills to help them cope and overcome academic challenges. Authoritative families are known to promote the most adaptive strategies among adolescents, such as higher self-enhancing attributes, less task-irrelevant behaviors, less passivity, and less failure expectations. High self-attribution is also found among permissive families, but permissive types are not as engaged in task-relevant behaviors. Authoritative and permissive styles are both high on supportiveness, so it can be inferred that certain adaptive strategies like self-attributions, are heavily influenced by the supportive dimension in Baumrind’s model.

A second inference is that demandingness influences task-relevant behaviors which can explain why students from authoritative families are more likely to engage in them than students from permissive. This study also pointed out that students from more authoritarian and neglectful families are more likely to use maladaptive strategies. Students who come from less supportive family types may perceive their parents as uncaring. This perception of lack of support may increase their self-doubt and discourage them from attempting to complete important academic tasks. Parents should intervene and foster healthier coping skills when their children feel doubt or discouraged. They should also be more involved in teaching adaptive skills so that their children can learn to overcome academic challenges.