Australian Parenting and Adolescent Boys’ and Girls’ Academic Performance and Mastery: The Mediating Effect of Perceptions of Parenting and Sense of School Membership

This study contributes to the understanding of how parenting relates to adolescents’ academic outcomes. This study tested the hypothesis that parenting behaviours, including parental warmth, anger, consistency and self-efficacy, are related to adolescents’ academic performance and mastery, and that this relationship is mediated by adolescent boys’ and girls’ perceptions of parenting and their sense of school membership in different ways. Multi-group nested structural equation models were built using the data obtained from Wave 5 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Four measures of parenting behaviours, adolescents’ perception of parenting behaviour, adolescents’ sense of school membership and their academic performance and mastery were obtained from 1926 boys and 1850 girls and their parents to test this study’s hypotheses. The path models showed that girls’ perceptions of parenting played a more explicit role in affecting their academic performance and mastery compared to boys. Furthermore, parenting behaviours were mediated by boys’ and girls’ sense of school membership, as influenced by their perceptions of parenting, in predicting their mastery and performance orientations, though the effects were quite different. The results suggest the roles played by parents in contributing to their children’s schooling and academic performance somewhat differ between boys and girls.