Parenting Styles and Children's Psychological Adjustment Research Proposal

Parenting Style and its Effect on Children's Psychological Adjustment: Authoritarian vs. Authoritative Parenting

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in identifying the external and internal factors that place children at risk for behavioral problems. Adjustment disorders have particularly been on the limelight, with recent statistics showing that approximately one-third of adolescents suffer from some form of adjustment disorder, compared to only 10% of the adult population (Schonbeck, 2006). Simply stated, an adjustment disorder is a mental-related illness resulting from one's failure to adjust accordingly to identifiable stressors in their external environment. In children, such stressors could be anything from being forced to move into a new neighborhood to being a victim of crime or losing a close family member. The resultant symptoms could be anything from social withdrawal, academic problems, school behavior problems, anxiety and depression.

The ecological systems theory suggests that a child's behavioral development is influenced by multiple interacting factors including school, culture, neighborhood, and family (Cohen, 2006). These factors interact to determine a child's behavioral characteristics, including how they respond to unforeseen stressors in their developmental environment (Cohen, 2006). Family is the primary influencer of behavioral development, taking a crucial part of a child's life right from birth and through their formative years when they are too young to interact personally with other social dimensions of society. Towards this end, everyone accepts the important role played by parenting in the family unit in a child's developmental process.

As a matter of fact, numerous studies have been conducted to explore the role played by parenting in the developmental system. However, most of these have focused on the role of parenting on children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors, creating a huge knowledge dearth in other behavioral aspects such as psychological adjustment. The researcher reckons that the lack of knowledge in this area has made effective policy-development a challenge, and is partly to blame for the high prevalence of adjustment disorders among children and adolescents.

Building on existing literature, therefore, the proposed study will seek to examine the effect of parenting style on a child's psychological adjustment. To increase objectivity, the research will focus on two parenting styles - authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles -- and will compare the two, with a view of determining which one yields the best outcomes in terms of helping children cope with unforeseen stressors in their external environment. Studies have yielded mixed results…