Parenting Practices as Modifiers and Moderators of Adolescents? Educational Outcomes

Christopher C. Weiss, Columbia University
Julien O. Teitler, Columbia University

Recent studies argue that parenting practices can be viewed as conscious efforts to manage children?s external environments, with parents seen as adopting strategies to affect the impact of the external world by channeling their children?s activities, closely monitoring them, or removing them from negative influences. In this paper, we assess whether such parenting practices can protect adolescents from harmful effects of social environments as well as promote the positive effects of social environments. We use data from the first wave of the Survey of Parents and Youth (SPY), a national study of adolescents and their parents. We find that parental management styles differ based on features of the environment, and that characteristics of parents and children are strongly associated with parenting behaviors. Parenting strategies geared towards shaping their child?s social involvement are strong predictors of academic outcomes while restrictive parent behaviors have little impact on these outcomes.