Investigating and comparing the relationship between parental monitoring types and perceived parenting styles of the Turkish students

Abstract

The relationship between parental monitoring and parental styles are considered as an important subject for child development field. The aim of this article is to analyze the perceptions of the adolescents about their parents’ parental monitoring and parenting styles in terms of the participants’ gender, family education and family jobs status. The sample size is 252 adolescents with 158 female nd 94 male students. The data were collected by the Parental Monitoring Instrument (PMI) and the Parenting Styles Scale. The sample was chosen from one Anatolian high school in Ankara, one Multi-Programme High School in Çankırı and one Multi-Programme High School in Yozgat with simple and random sampling. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between mother acceptance/warmth and gender scores t(250)=3,281 and mother control and gender scores t(250)=2,263; p<0.05. The study also analyzed the relationship between adolescent ages and grades as well as the number of children, mothers’ ages and fathers’ ages and the parental style with some statistically significant results. The one-way ANOVA results indicated that there are statistically significant differences between adolescents’ perceptions of parental monitoring sub-scales and the mothers’ parenting styles sub-scales. Except computer monitoring, in all parental monitoring sub-scales, the mothers parenting styles have shown statistically significant differences.