The Joint Impact of Paternal and Maternal Parenting Styles on Children's High-School Academic Achievement in Taiwan

The present research used data gathered by Taiwan Education Panel Survey (TEPS) in 2001 and 2003 to explore how fathers’ and mothers’ parenting styles jointly influenced their children’s academic achievement in junior high. Using latent class analysis (LCA), the research uncovered the same four parenting styles for both Taiwanese fathers and mothers. These four parenting styles are consistent with parenting typology often discussed in the literature and can be labeled as authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful. Since the majority of Taiwanese children lived with both biological parents and not much research has been done to understand how both father’s and mother’s parenting styles jointly influenced their children’s development, the research further used LCA to construct 16 joint parenting styles to investigate how these styles were related to children’s academic achievement. The research found that children with both parents adopting the permissive style would have the best academic performance in junior high. Past studies have indicated that authoritative parenting would be conducive to good academic achievement. The present research showed that when one of the parents was authoritative, for their children to perform well in junior high, the other parent should be more permissive. In other words, in the traditional Chinese view of parenting, there should be a combination of being “yan” (strict) and being “tsi” (kind). The research further found that if paternal parenting was authoritative and maternal parenting was neglectful, this type of joint parenting style would have the most negative impact on their children’s academic achievement. In short, the findings of present research clearly demonstrate the importance of understanding the joint impact of paternal and maternal parenting on their adolescent children’s development in Taiwan.