The Impact of Parental Parenting Styles on High School Students' Coping Strategies

Modern high school students experience a variety of developmental pressures, and normative psychological responses to stressors are strongly influenced by parental rearing approaches and styles. Authoritative parenting generally helps a student develop proactive behaviours as a coping mechanism while authoritarian parenting generally elicits either avoidance or confrontation and permissive families may limit adolescents' reserves of coping resources. Studies have highlighted how parenting behaviour relates to high school students' appraisal of stress and coping strategy use through three main pathways: emotional modelling, cognitive shaping, and relational style. Adolescent individual attributes and contextual factors represent more complex moderating variables. Educators should consider the parental style as an important basis for psychological resilience that provides a theoretical base for collaborative home-school interventions. From an educational standpoint there is an acute need to incorporate family variables within the mental health educational space and steer a shift in understanding parenting philosophy as being process orientated, as opposed to outcome based.