Conductas prosostenibilidad y percepciones del estudiantado adolescente sobre prácticas parentales y valores familiares

Abstract

The family plays a fundamental role both in socialization and in the configuration of values in minors and adolescents; including those related to environmental care. In keeping with this premise, Unicef (2018) announced that the sustainable development of the planet requires counting on families; it pointed them out as essential collaborators of governments for the quality of life of future generations. Considered a natural and elemental unit of all modern societies and an educational agent of the first order for the development and psychosocial adjustment of its members, the family is also a primary socialization agent (Fontana-Abad, Gil y Reyero, 2013). It plays a key role in the internalization of prosocial values, such as self-transcendence (care and universalism) and conservation (conformity, safety, and tradition); values closely related to pro-environmental behaviors (Barrera-Her-nández, Sotelo, Echeverría y Tapia, 2020). Following this line, this research studies the perceptions that adolescents have about family values, parental support for autonomy, and environmental care practices, according to the 3R rule, in a triple perspective: reduce, reuse, and recycle. It uses a quantitative, descriptive, and relational methodology. The target population was high school adolescents from the city of Cuenca (Ecuador). The sample was made up of 122 adolescents which attended three schools: one private educational unit (36.1 %) and two public (27.9 % and 36.1 %). Of the respondents, 38.8 % were female and 61.2 % were male, and they all were between 15 and 19 years old (M = 16.4; SD = 1.2); 27 % were in their first year of high school (15-17 years), 44.3 % were in their second year of high school (16-18 years) and the 28.7 % were in their third year (17-19 years). Data analysis includes comparison of means, Pearson’s r correlation coefficient and simple linear regression. The results indicate that a high percentage of the adolescents in the study carry out at least one of the following environmental care actions (these are organized from highest to lowest frequency): saving water and electricity consumption, using garbage cans, reusing bottles, separating garbage, and participating in actions in favor of environment. Likewise, it is detected that they perceive family as a driving agent for their development as autonomous subjects, and a promising factor for the process of integration of values and the development of competencies for caring for the environment; however, they still recognize the school as the place where their commitment to a sustainable future is most intensely forged. Additionally, the adolescents in the study perceive a high parental support for their autonomy and, likewise, that mothers attach greater importance to the value of helping others, a central axis in the ethics of care that characterizes the paradigm of sustainability. This research corroborated, once again, the ONU’s (2015) position when it indicates that the family is a main agent of change for sustainability, with a decisive influence on the preservation of life and ecosystems. It endorses the relevance of promoting educational strategies that promote family-school relations in order to enhance the role of the former in the acquisition of pro-environmental values and, ultimately, its collaboration in the quality of formal education aimed at sustainability. With these results, a path is opened to improve the knowledge on the parental role in relation to the promotion of behaviors of environmental care (pro-sustainability), within the framework of adolescents’ and young people’s formal education.