WILL THE CHOICE OF PARENTING STYLE BE AFFECTED BY PARENTS’ SELF-EFFICACY AND SELF PERCEPTION OF CONTROL

Abstract

"Previous studies have widely explored the impacts of different parenting styles on children's developmental outcomes. Authoritative parenting is generally regarded as supportive and nurturing to children's psychological well-being. The concept of ""control"" is one of the important topics in the study of parenting. Previous studies mainly focused on the impacts of parental control over child discipline. However, the amount of research exploring the association between parental perceived controllability in their parenting practice and the choice of parenting styles is rare. The purpose of this study was to fill up this gap. A total of 157 parents participated in this survey, including 38 fathers and 119 mothers. The mean age of their children was 4.67. Three constructs were designed as independent variables to measure parental attributes on control, including parental efficacy, parental self-control, and parental perceived controllability over their children. This study was conducted within the context of the pandemic situation in which parents allowed their children and themselves to use mobile phones during the pandemic. Parental efficacy was measured by a one-item scale, as proposed by Bandura (2016), which was ""How much can you do to control the time your child spends"". The lack of parents' self-control was measured by studying how frequently they used their mobile phones with absent-mindedness. Parental perceived controllability was measured by parents' expected time consumption on a mobile phone by their child minus the exact time consumed in their mobile phone usage. The bigger the positive difference represented, the stronger parent's perceived controllability over child discipline. The result showed that the practice of the authoritative parenting style was significantly predicted by parental self-efficacy (?=0.239, p=0.003) and perceived controllability (?=0.154, p=0.050). However, the practice of authoritarian parenting style was predicted by a lack of self-control (?=0.423, p<0.001) and lack of perceived controllability (?=-0.159, p=0.030) but not parental self-efficacy (?=0.031, p=0.670). Similarly, for the practice of the permissive parenting style, it was predicted by a lack of self-control (?=0.477, p<0.001), and a lack of perceived controllability (?=-0.178, p=0.011). It implies that parents with authoritative parenting styles seem to have more internal resources for exercising appropriate parental control in child discipline than parents with authoritarian and permissive parenting styles. Perhaps, these parents may express their difficulty in exercising control in parenting in different ways. Recommendations for future parent education on learning ""parental control"" will be discussed."