Relationship between parenting style and academic adjustment among form one secondary school students in Nyaribari Chache Sub-county, Kisii County, Kenya

Abstract

Adolescents social interactions and relationships with parents have been related consistently to various aspects of school adjustment, including academic accomplishments. Parents actively teach children about themselves and what they need to do to become accepted and competent members of their social worlds. As a result, children adopt sets of values, standards for behavior, and goals that adults would like them to achieve. Many students are admitted to secondary schools but not all of them manage to successfully go through the four year course. This is because some students experience difficulties in academic adjustment and therefore end up dropping out of school before completing their course. The present study examined the relationship between parenting styles and the academic adjustments among form one secondary students. The study objectives were: to establish the relationship between authoritative Parenting Style and Academic Adjustment; to find out the relationship between authoritarian parenting style and academic adjustment among Form One secondary students; to investigate the relationship between Permissive Parenting Style and Academic Adjustment Among Form One Secondary School Students and to determine the relationship between indulgent/neglectful parenting style and academic adjustment among Form One secondary school students in NyaribariChache Sub-County, Kisii County. The study employed Expo-facto research design. The total numbers of secondary schools in the Sub-County were 30 while the entire population of form one secondary school students was 5480. The study will use a sample of 548. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select 15 secondary schools from the 30 schools in the sub-county. Stratified random sampling was also used to select respondents to reflect gender in each sampled school. Respondents from each stratum were selected by simple random sampling. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the form 1 students. The split-half method was used to determine reliability of questionnaires and a value of r=0.832 was reported. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages and means, the inferential statistics, Pearson-Product Moment Correlation were used to establish association between parenting styles and academic adjustment at 0.05 level of significance. The results indicated a strong positive correlation between authoritative parenting Style and academic adjustment of the students, with r = 0.724; there was a positive correlation between authoritarian parenting Style and academic adjustment of the students, with r =0.619; a weak positive correlation between permissive parenting Style and academic adjustment of the students, with r = 0.041 and a negative correlation between neglecting parenting Style and academic adjustment of the students, with r = - 0.33. Teacher counselors should seek ways to strengthen their relationship with the parents in order to gain a better understanding of their parenting styles and then handle each child according to the parenting style applied.