Relations of Perceived Maternal Parenting Style,Practices, and Learning Motivation to AcademicCompetence in Chinese Children

摘要

A measure of academic parenting practices was developed through parent andteacher interviews and subsequently administered to 91 Hong Kong Chinesefifth graders, who also rated their mothers' restrictiveness and concern, schoolmotivation, and self-perceived academic competence. Children's actual schoolgrades were obtained from school records. The new measure of parenting prac-tices exhibited satisfactory factorial validity and reliability. Perceived parentingstyles of concern and restrictiveness, although theoretically independent, werehighly associated. Perceived maternal practices of support and encouragementexplained unique variance in children's learning motivation. Achievementdemands, together with restrictive parenting style, explained children's actualacademic performances. Children's mastery motivation, but not maternal social-ization practices and style, explained children's perceived competence. Find-ings are in line with existing models of family interaction (e.g., Kagitcibasi,2005) and underscore the importance of specific parenting practices as well asgeneral parenting styles in explaining different socialization outcomes in chil-dren (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).