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Article Excerpt
A measure of academic parenting practices was developed through parent and teacher interviews and subsequently administered to 91 Hong Kong Chinese fifth graders, who also rated their mothers' restrictiveness and concern, school motivation, and self-perceived academic competence. Children's actual school grades were obtained from school records. The new measure of parenting practices exhibited satisfactory factorial validity and reliability. Perceived parenting styles of concern and restrictiveness, although theoretically independent, were highly associated. Perceived maternal practices of support and encouragement explained unique variance in children's learning motivation. Achievement demands, together with restrictive parenting style, explained children's actual academic performances. Children's mastery motivation, but not maternal socialization practices and style, explained children's perceived competence. Findings are in line with existing models of family interaction (e.g., Kagitcibasi, 2005) and underscore the importance of specific parenting practices as well as general parenting styles in explaining different socialization outcomes in children (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).
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Chinese children are renowned for their academic prowess (e.g., Stevenson, Chen, & Lee, 1993; Stevenson, Stigler, Lee, Lucker, Kitamura, & Hsu, 1985). Although cross-national and cross-ethnic studies have suggested a number of factors, including cultural beliefs, educational systems, parenting, and socialization, that explain the success of Chinese students at a group level (e.g., Chao, 1996; Eaton & Dembo, 1997; Geary, 1996; Huntsinger, Jose, Larson, Kreig, & Shaligram, 2000; Sy & Schulenberg, 2005; Tweed & Lehman, 2002), the importance of parenting for children's academic success is much less clear within Chinese societies. In the present study, we consider maternal parenting styles and practices in relation to academic motivation and achievement in Hong Kong Chinese children.
Parenting style is defined as "a constellation of attitudes toward the child that are communicated to the child and that, taken together, create an emotional climate in which the parent's behaviors are expressed" (Darling & Steinberg, 1993, p. 488). Although parenting style is often measured using Baumrind's (1971) conceptualizations, the extant findings among Chinese or Chinese immigrants are equivocal (see Lim & Lim, 2004, for a review). Given the theoretical (e.g., Chao, 1994; Chao, 2000) and empirical (e.g., Leung, Lau, & Lam, 1998; McBride-Chang & Chang, 1998) uncertainties of applying Western concepts of authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles to characterize Chinese parents, in the present study we tested general parenting style using the orthogonal approach (Lim & Lim, 2004), which focused on two central dimensions commonly known as responsiveness and control (Maccoby & Martin, 1983) or otherwise as concern and restrictiveness (e.g., Chan, 1976; Shek, 1995). According to Shek (1995), concern entails parental qualities such as sensitivity, warmth, encouragement, closeness, consistency and being just, whereas restrictiveness is defined by qualities including sternness, hardness, tenseness, and severity. Although the term "restrictiveness" may appear harsher than what is usually meant by control, it is the limit-setting aspect of adult-imposed restrictiveness that is employed here. Concern and restrictiveness are related to core aspects of the responsiveness and control dimensions. Following Chan (1976) and Shek (1995), the present study uses the terms "concern" and "restrictiveness" to represent two central dimensions of general parenting style.
Kagitcibasi's (2005) family model of psychological interdependence describes the coexistence of parental control, emotional relatedness, and autonomy orientation across Asian families. This coexistence is demonstrated in a number of studies (Lin & Fu, 1990; Stewart, Bond, Deeds, & Chung, 1999). Chinese as well as some other Asian mothers may be restrictive or controlling, but at the same time, warmth and concern are often perceived. Indeed, low parental control is even perceived as a form of rejection in Korean and Japanese adolescents (Rohner & Pettingill, 1985; Trommsdorff, 1985). Therefore, parental restrictiveness and concern may be largely independent but interrelated, depending on cultural values. In some Chinese societies, because of the extreme emphasis on academic achievement, Chao (1994) has proposed that parents foster school competence through a unique style called guan (meaning to govern) and chiao shun (training). These constructs entail parental expectations of hard work, self-discipline, and obedience. Despite its somewhat negative connotation in English, guan has a positive connotation in Chinese (Chen & Luster, 2002). Chinese parents often guan out of love, although it is often the guan, rather than the love per se, that is overtly conveyed through this style. However, despite the fact that the measure of guan was first conceptualized to relate particularly to academic training, guan has thus far been related to psychosocial functioning rather than school achievement (e.g., Stewart, Bond, Kennard, Ho, & Zaman, 2002; Stewart, Rao, Bond, McBride-Chang, Fielding, & Kennard, 1998). That is, there is little empirical evidence that guan is uniquely associated with school performance among Chinese children. In the present study, we selected Shek's (1995) scale, which has been used in a number of studies of Hong Kong children and adolescents, to examine child-perceived maternal treatment styles of restrictiveness and concern.
In contrast to parenting styles, which may be conveyed across a wide variety of situations, parenting practices are behaviors or strategies undertaken by parents to achieve specific competence goals in specific situations. Practices do not necessarily have the same meaning across different contexts or cultures (Hart, Yang, Nelson, Jin, Bazarskaya, & Nelson, 1998; Stewart & Bond, 2002) or even between ethnic groups of the same country (Chao, 2001). For example, parents' insistence that a child perform well academically as manifested via frequent reminders of the potential bad consequences of a poor examination result is a goal-directed and situation-specific behavior. In addition, the meaning and consequences of such a practice could vary greatly across cultures. Darling and Steinberg (1993) pointed out that the study of socialization processes cannot be separated from the study of parental goals, style, and practices. Essentially, the study of specific socialization practices, rather than style, is believed to enable researchers to understand specific child outcomes as a direct consequence of certain socialization goals (e.g., academic achievement). It is important to note, however, that emphasizing the importance of practice is not to deny the value of parenting style. Rather, parental goals, style, and practices are closely connected concepts in child socialization (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). In the present study, respective roles of maternal style and practices are both included in explaining children's learning motivation and achievement.
Apart from parenting (e.g., Chao, 2000; Sy & Schulenberg, 2005), children's learning motivation is strongly linked to their academic achievement (Chen& Stevenson, 1995; de Bruyn, Dekovic, & Meijnen, 2003; Marchant, Paulson, & Rothlisberg, 2001). In the United States, children may perform best and most persistently on a school task when they find the learning task enjoyable and interesting (Dweck, 1986; Licht & Dweck, 1984). In addition, motivation may be one of the mediators bridging the two ends between parenting and academic performance (de Bruyn et al., 2003; Leung & Kwan, 1998). In a study in Hong Kong, Leung and Kwan (1998) found that parenting practices are related to adolescents' learning and performance...
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