Admas Development Journal

PARENTING STYLES: THEIR RELATION WITH POVERTY AND EDUCATION

TESHWAL ASHAGRIE  *

and

AMANUEL HAILE *^*

Abstract: The main objective of this study is to examine the relationship of parenting styles with poverty and education. In light of this objective, four regions, five types of occupation, and 318 parents were selected by random sampling techniques (300 for questionnaires and 18 for interviews). Quantitative analyses have been used to analyze the data obtained through the questionnaires. Alpha value of 0.01 is used for significance tests in this study. The information from the interview is categorized in themes and analyzed using qualitative methods. According to our findings, it seems warranted that parenting styles have a significant relationship with poverty and education.

1.      INTRODUCTION

Parenting may be defined as a process of developing and utilizing the knowledge and skills appropriate for planning, creating, giving birth to, and rearing, and / or providing care for offspring (Morrison 1978:23). Brooks (1987) adds that it is a nurturing process that includes nourishing, protecting, and guiding the child through the course of its development. Literature evidence suggests that childhood socialization has strongly emphasized the role of parents. This is, in the traditional African context, ideally extended to all those within the child’s environment such as siblings, relatives, teachers, friends, and other responsible individuals, who would help influence the holistic development of the individual for the better.

Ryder (1985) explains that parenthood is actually a career with a job description whereby dedication from the parent is required.  Once a parent undertakes this duty, the parents’ daily plans would have to be altered to accommodate such an important and taxing responsibility. There will be routines of nurturance whereby parents need to give love, guidance, and attention so as to develop the child. Parents are also expected to discipline the child in order to guide and shape the development of the child and to teach socially accepted modes of behavior.

Parenting children is a difficult and demanding job as it is concerned with a continual effort of shaping individuals, who are searching for identity, pressing against parental boundaries, and finding their own way (Craig, 2003).  As Yorburg (2002) indicates, in all societies, parents grapple with how to raise their children in a way that prepares them for the complexities of life as well as equip them to become parents themselves in the future (Hamner and Turner, 2001).

Social scientists have consistently reported on more individualistic than structural explanations of the causal attribution for poverty. For instance, in an examination of a national representative sample from the US, Feagin, (1972), observed that a significant and high number of respondents offered individualistic reasons (like lack of effort or loose morals), or fatalistic reasons (like bad luck, illness, or God's will), rather than structural reasons (like insufficient public educational institutions and health care system). Findings originating from Western Europe revealed somewhat different and mixed results from those published in the US. Furnham (1982) found more egalitarian than individualistic attitudes among respondents who were British subjects. The findings in other European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Holland, Portugal, and United Kingdom (Commission of the European Communities, 1990) indicated that most common attributes for poverty are bad luck (fatalist), laziness, and lack of will power (individualistic), and injustice in the society (societal). In a comparative study of Australian and Malawi university students, Carr and MacLachan (1998) reported the Australians use fewer structural explanations for the causal attributes for poverty than their Malawi counterparts.

According to the previous literature, it is indicated that those from the dominant racial, religious, older, male and having high income favour individualistic attribution for poverty (Feagin, 1975; Huber & Form, 1973; Kluged & Smith, 1986; Oradea, 1980).

Questions still remain as to why in the developing countries, there continues to be a prevalence of structural causes in the attribution for poverty. It is not clear whether it is connected with the policies or economic dominance of some that fuel much of the suppressed anger toward the ruling regime, government institutions, and the structures it reproduces.

Kluegel and Smith (1986) analyzed various psychological mechanisms of attribution biases in life experiences and some demographic variables related to the attribution for poverty in psychosocial terms. Class, political behaviour (Furnham, 1982), financial status (Williamson, 1974), and ethnicity (Hunt, 1996) were also used as predictors of the attribution for poverty. It appears logical to conceptualize that the variables of education, income, occupation, age, and gender should fit into two perspectives of attribution of responsibility for poverty, namely, the culture of poverty hypothesis (Bullock, 1999), and system blame hypothesis (Della Fave, 1974).

Nasser & Abouchedid (2001) did not indicate if the educational status of respondents’ gender, religion, socio-economic status, and employment act as predictors to the attribution for poverty, although an extension of the underlying logic of earlier studies (Pandey,Sinha, Prakash, & Tripathi, 1982; Sinha, Jain, & Pandey, 1980) did not preclude such a probability.

Effects of poor parenting contribute to poverty, which has been believed to make individuals become stressful, depressed, and neglectful, and therefore developing aggression.  Poverty, therefore, has been found to affect children largely by affecting parenting.  Certainly, parenting is a challenging task considering that parents have to work towards breaking the poverty cycle among its offspring and the future members of the society (Hammni and Brim, 1990).

Darling (1999) points out that a strong correlation exists between parenting styles and the child’s wellbeing, social development, academic achievement, psychological development, and problem of behaviour. In addition, Sampson and Laub (1995) assert that the effect of economic disadvantage on delinquency can be attributed to correctable mistakes in parenting and these include, among others, inadequate supervision of young children, harsh discipline, and impaired parent-child attachment.

Manion and Wilson (1995) add that it has been established that families that provide strong psychological support, strong sense of values, and conventional role models, and parents who foster and establish strong relationships with their children, tend to have fewer rates of child antisocial/ criminal activity.

Wills and Chao (1998) state” For too long we've characterized poor families and single-parent families as the source of children with behaviour problems and low academic achievement. It's really not the case. What really matters is parenting practices: how they parent, how much they're engaged with their children, how responsive they are, how much they monitor”.