The Role of Parenting Styles and Psychological Closeness in Child's School Performance and Self-Esteem

In the focus of the present paper was the investigation of the relationship between the parenting styles, the psychological closeness, and the child’s self-esteem and school performance. We studied three parenting styles, psychological closeness in child’s estimation and parent’s estimation and how they affect on the level of self-esteem and school performance. We tried to find which of the parenting styles helps to achieve the highest outcomes in self-esteem and school-performance. The total sample included 100 respondents (parent-child dyads). The parents and the children were surveyed with the use of the questionnaire measuring parenting styles (Parental authority questionnaire (PAQ) of Buri, 1991), and perceived parent-child psychological closeness estimated by parents and children, and the children were especially surveyed by the scales of perceived self-esteem and school performance. The results of the Amos Path analysis showed that the authoritarian style is positively related to school performance, the authoritarian parenting style is negatively related to school performance, and permissive parenting style has no relation neither to self-esteem, nor to school performance. The psychological closeness in the estimation of the child is positively related to self-esteem and school performance, while the psychological closeness in the estimation of the parent relates to school performance, but does not relate to self-esteem. Moreover, our results revealed that the self-transcendence values predetermine the authoritative parenting style, and the high level of conservation values and the low expression of the self-transcendence values define the authoritarian style.