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Pedagogy Stricter parents harm children's school performance
Children of very severe parents apparently have more problems at school. This is what American scientists came up with after evaluating data from more than a thousand participants in a long-term study. Adolescents from authoritarian families would not prefer their parents, but rather their friends and spend more time with them than with school affairs. The researchers published their results in the journal "Child Development".
Better performance through a loving parent-child relationship
If a "strong hand" prevails at home, the children can also follow the rules and perform better at school - this is presumably followed by many parents who support an authoritarian style of education. But is this assumption true? Researchers led by Rochelle Hentges from the University of Pittsburgh (USA) have investigated the impact of particularly rigorous education and discovered that often just the opposite is the case.
Children who experience hard, violent education at home achieve comparatively poorer school performance. (Image: Nomad_Soul / fotolia.com) Thus, authoritarian behavior by parents does not lead to better performance, but in many cases even to a particularly poor performance compared to children of less strict parents, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) reports in a recent press release.
Researchers evaluate data from more than 1000 children and adolescents
The researchers used data from 1,060 participants in the long-term study "Maryland Adolescent Development in Context" (MADICS) for their project. The evaluation focused on the impact of social conditions on the academic and psychosocial development of young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. The scientists documented the highest achieved school leaving qualifications and whether and in what form these victims of verbal or physical attacks by their parents had become. It also collected data on peer relationships, criminal behavior and sexuality.
Affected children are more likely to violate rules
It became clear that children who were trained with "hardship" were more oriented towards friends than their parents and more often violated rules in order to maintain their friendships. Measures and behaviors such as yelling, beating and verbal or physical threats were defined as "harsh" as a means of punishment.
Two years later, children who had experienced a strict and aggressive parenting style were more inclined to say that their peer group is more important than other responsibilities, such as parents' rules. This in turn led to a riskier behavior in the 11th grade,
including frequent early sexual behavior in the young women and greater delinquency (e.g., beating, stealing) in the young men. These behaviors eventually resulted in inferior academic achievement as well as earlier leaving high school or college.
"Teenagers whose needs are not met by their key caregivers can seek peer affirmation," Hentges said. "This may involve turning to peers unhealthily and leading to increased aggression and crime as well as early sexual behavior - at the expense of long-term goals such as higher education attainment," the expert continues.
For many children, home violence is everyday life
The results of the US colleagues are from the point of view of the educationalist Prof. Dr. med. Holger Ziegler from the University of Bielefeld no surprise. Rather, they would confirm that "insults and corporal punishment do not thrive on the development of young people," said the expert to the news agency "dpa". Already the "small slap" on the Po harms the parenting, for example, showed recently a study of the University of Texas and the University of Michigan.
Although Ziegler was not involved in the current project itself, but had shown a few years ago with the "Violence Study 2013" that violence by the parents in this country for many adolescents continue to be terrifying everyday. Thus, almost a quarter (22.3%) of adults' children and adolescents are beaten or sometimes beaten - although since 2000, there is a legal right to non-violent education.
Affected children must be specifically supported
The US scientists now hope that their findings will feed into prevention and intervention programs that could increase student engagement and graduation rates. "Since children who are exposed to hard and aggressive education are prone to lower levels of education, they should become the target of appropriate interventions," said study co-author Ming-Te Wang. (No)