Influence of Parental Occupation and Level of Education on Stress, Anxiety and Adjustment among School Children

Abstract

In this era of globalization, technological advancement, lust of achievement and the current problems in educational setup of our country, made the life of student cumbersome. Researches on academic stress, anxiety and adjustment have explored the basic academic pressure burdening the school going children and to identify flows in the educational systems.The students today would be the teachers tomorrow. They will be giving their country whatever, their country has given them. Students are the future handlers of a nation. What students learn today will be used and implemented tomorrow for the betterment of the country. They are the future educationalists, bankers, politicians, businessmen, doctors, engineers etc. Some of these students would be the policy makers in the country helping the government to make policies some would be scientists helping the country to innovate things.Stress is believed to be caused by the various problems that exist such as problems at school, financial problems, family problems and problems in their surroundings. Teenagers also experience stress because they are sometimes trapped between making decisions which is to follow rules and orders or to be free and discover the world like they should. Teenagers in earlier days were trained for things that were suitable with their age so that they can use it to manage their lives. But now, teenagers have to follow their parents' desire which is preparing them to compete in the social system where the society is scrambling towards modernization so that they are not left behind. If it is not managed well, stress can ignite psychological disturbances among them when they are grown up. These disturbances will cause stress to the teenagers in the future if they will not overcome now.Therefore, the role of the students can become important even before they jumped into the real world. A stressed, maladjusted, depressed student community can bring a bad name to the country and may eventually harm the process of development as investors would unsure of their future and they won't be able to help their country and its economy. So it is an urgent need of the present hour to measure the level of stress, anxiety and adjustment of the school students. The school management and parents can provide students a healthy environment so the students become stress free and well adjusted in environment and highly motivated.According to Aggrawal (2004), the adjustment of adolescent very much depends on the fulfillment of their significant specific needs that consist of physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, intellectual needs, moral needs and vocational needs. As mentioned earlier, students from English medium school tend to exhibit better emotional adjustment while their counterparts from rural schools display relatively better educational adjustment as they do experience stress from their teachers and parents regarding their academic performance. Studies by Sharma and Gakkar (1991) and Pradhan (1992) have obtained similar results.Sharma et al. (2011 ) parenting style has been found to predict the child's well being in various domains such as social competence, academic performance, psychological development, adjustment and problem behaviour. Hussain et al. (2008) in their study found that the level of overall adjustment of public school students was more poor then the government school students.Raju and Rahmatulla (2007) .Significant difference is observed between boys and girls on the financial and emotional factors of adjustment. On the financial adjustment dimension, girls have higher mean scores than the boys indicating that they have better financial adjustment. An examination of the individual items of the financial adjustment factor indicated that girl students as compared to boy students' feel their parents' fulfill their needs easily. This could be because parents of girl students tend to give more importance to the needs of their daughters. …