Parenting as a resource factor for academic stress

Pages: 568-574
Kirti Madnani and Madhurima Pradhan (Department of Psychology, Lucknow University, Luchnow, Uttar Pradesh)

Academic stress has emerged as one of the probable reasons causing mental health problems among adolescents in recent years. Positive parenting practices may act as a resource to meet out academic stress of adolescents by developing self-efficacy, self confidence, optimism and hope among them. This paper identifies the role of parenting in reducing the academic stress of senior secondary students. The sample comprises of 220 twelfth class students from private schools of Lucknow and Kanpur cities of Uttar Pradesh. Parenting scale by Bharadwaj, Sharma and Garg (1998) was used to assess student’s perceived parenting on eight dimensions. Academic stress was measured with the help of academic stress scale developed by the researchers having 46 items and adequate reliability and validity. Results of descriptive statistics indicate that students perceived their parents positively. All the dimensions of parenting as well as overall parenting have been found to be significantly and negatively correlated with academic stress. Results of stepwise multiple regression analysis reveal that two dimensions of parenting i.e. utopian expectation vs. realism and lenient standard vs. moralism predicted academic stress significantly. In addition, no significant difference in the level of academic stress was found across gender.