The Effect of Parenting Styles on Metacognition and Academic Self-Concept Among Young Adults

The main objective behind this research was to underline the effect of parenting styles on the metacognitions and academic self-concept of young adults. 160 young adults in the age range of 18 to 26 years were asked to share information about their parenting styles and metacognitions. The tools used for this were the Parental Authority Questionnaire (Buri, 1991), Meta Cognition Questionnaire (MCQ-30, Wells and Cartwright-Hatton, 2004), and Academic Self-Concept Scale by Liu and Wang (2005). The statistical analysis for the data was done by calculating the mean, standard deviation, and one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The result of the data analysis put forward that father’s permissive parenting style leads to higher cognitive self-consciousness and also effect the total score of metacognitions. In the case of mothers, parenting styles were seen to have no effect on metacognition among young adults. It was also found that parenting styles of neither fathers nor mothers had any significant effect on the academic self-concept of the participants. A significant limitation of this study was the small sample size which was also not representative of the larger population. Future research is needed on these variables to understand the possible positive effect of fatherly authority, as well as the effect of mothers on positive metacognitions, which were not the focus in this study. There also needs to be further research on different aspects of parenting and their effect on academic self-concept.