Relationships Between Parenting Styles and Self-Efficacy of Older Adolescents with Disabilities

Self-efficacy assesses a wide-ranging scope of personal aptitude and behavioral skills to deal with a diverse spectrum of complex and stressful scenarios. Adolescence is often considered to be a time of intense stress and turmoil. As such, it is important for adolescents to have a high a sufficient level of self-efficacy. Adolescents with disabilities meet more obstacles and difficulties throughout their life than their peers without serious health problems. Disability can be a factor in reducing their sense of self-efficacy, but also a promoter of it, depending on how family deals with the reality of their child’s disability. Parenting styles can influence adolescents’ self-efficacy, and it is also important how adolescents perceive them. The present study is aimed to analyze self-efficacy of adolescents with disabilities and the impact of perceived parenting styles on it, and to compare this impact among two groups of adolescents – with and without disabilities. The results showed that the levels of self-efficacy of adolescents with and without disabilities are not statistically different. Perceived authoritative parenting style has a positive influence on self-efficacy of disabled adolescents, and authoritarian style has a negative impact on it. Also, we found that perceived authoritarian parenting style is negatively related to self-efficacy of non-disabled adolescents.