How have parents raised their kids ? Adolescent ’ s perception of parental responsiveness and demandingness

The relationship between parents and children and human development has been the greatest interest to Psychology because it impacts the youth’s behaviour and well being. Thus, this study aimed to investigate parental styles adopted by adolescents’ parents from a combination of responsiveness and demandingness dimensions as well as by gender and age group. 296 adolescents aged 14 to 19 years (M=16.03; DP=0.96), high school students from public and private schools in the city of Passo Fundo/RS and surrounding area participated of this study. We used a sociodemographic data questionnaire constructed for the study and Scale of Parental Responsiveness and Demandingness. The analysis revealed that there was a balance between the perception of neglectful (33.1%) e authoritative (32.7%) styles, followed by authoritarian (17.3%) and permissive (16.9%) styles. There were no statistical differences between responsiveness and demandingness and sex. The younger adolescents perceive their mothers as significantly more demanding when compared to the older ones. The same occured with the combined demandingness. The results also indicate that there were statistically significant differences in the perception of responsiveness and demandingness by age group. The findings of this study suggest further investigations, relating parental styles with other variables of influence and evidence the need of parental training for parents who adopt neglectful style.


Introduction
Human development is characterized as a continuous process, targeted by biological influences, both situational and contextual, during the life cycle.During the childhood, the socialization process is through the family, which introduces their children to the social context (Baumrind, 1997;Maccoby, 1992).The family, despite going through numerous and rapid changes, remains the major reference in the children's education (Goede, Branje, & Meeus, 2009;Osorio & Valle 2009).In turn, adolescence is a period of the life cycle characterized by the emergence of major changes and acquisitions, in the biological, psychological and social spheres, and particularly in defining their identity and the independence from the parents, which then mourn the child's dependence, while developing mental tasks that enable the development of the new adult identity.It is common in this period that parents have a more relaxed posture regarding the education that was carried out in childhood as a result of the natural detachment of adolescents from their parents to join peer groups, and an increasing autonomy, among other factors (Cole & Cole, 2004;Cruz, 2007;Guimarães, Hochgraf, Brasiliano, & Ingerman, 2009;Stengel, 2011).
Considering that in adolescence the parental influence remains central in the life of an individual (Guimarães et al., 2009), the educational practices used by parents are important variables that influence the development of adolescents (Barbosa, Neumann, Alves, Texeira, & Wagner, 2017;Pacheco, Silveira, & Schneider, 2008;Patias, Smith, & Day, 2013).Through educational strategies, also called parenting practices, parents seek to guide their children in an attempt to internalize the moral principles and standards of behavior considered the most appropriate (Baumrind, 1997;Maccoby, 1992).
Recognizing that how parents educate their children has a crucial influence on their development, some scholars started investigating how this influence works and what is its impact on the teenager.One of the leading and pioneering scientific models that deals with parenting styles and practices is Baumrind's (1966), which was reviewed by Maccoby and Martin in the 90s, and later replicated by many researchers throughout the world.Two main dimensions of parenting practices were mentioned: responsiveness and the demandingness (Alvarenga, Weber & Bolsoni-Silva, 2016).According to this theoretical model, responsiveness concerns acceptance, understanding, communication, affection and support.On the other hand, demandingness is about control, monitoring, demanding and discipline (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).Responsiveness and demandingness have been studied and discussed in the literature as a means to investigate the styles of raising children and their implications on the development of children and adolescents.Those researches contribute to the understanding of the interactions between parents and children and also to preventing negative educational practices (Alvarenga et al., 2016;Barbosa, Neumann, Alves, Teixeira, & Wagner, 2017;Baumrind, 1966Baumrind, , 1997;;Carvalho & Gomide, 2005;Costa, Teixeira, and Gomes, 2000;Darling & Steinberg, 1993;Goede et al., 2009;Hoffman, 1960;Macarini, Martins, Minetto, and Vieira, 2010;Pacheco, 2004;Pacheco et al., 2008;Patias, Dias, Mahl, & Fiorin, 2012;Patias et al. 2013;Pratta & Santos, 2007;Reichert & Wagner, 2007;Silva, Constantino, & Rondini, 2012;Teixeira Bardagi, & Gomes, 2004;Weber, Prado, Viezzer, & Brandenburg, 2004).
Educational practices can be shown as specific strategies used in day to day life in different contexts, aimed at social and behavioral education of the children in order to promote their development, but as performed, can serve both as a risk factor and as protecting the development (Macarini et al., 2010;Patias et al., 2012).The parenting style goes beyond educational practices, involving both culture and the context in which the socialization of parents with children occurs, in agreement with their beliefs and values, that is, how is the involvement and interaction between them.These interactions and involvement are manifested and supported by the principles of relationship that parents have with their children, such as hierarchies, control, affection and decision-making (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).
In the pioneering study by Baumrind (1966), which integrated the behavioral and affective aspects related to raising children, the author highlights the authority that parents exert in the relationship between parents and children.This authority is related to a way of control, serving as an instrument to transmit values and beliefs.Its manifestation in the education of children can be achieved through a hierarchical and coercive pattern that, in most cases, is linked to the use of physical punishment and deprivation of privileges.With this, the author adds emotional and behavioral aspects to the education of children in relation to the parental conduct, developing three different parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian and permissive (Baumrind, 1966;1997).
In the 80s, Maccoby and Martin (1983) expanded the study by Baumrind (1966), dividing the permissive parenting style in two styles: indulgent and negligent.Thus, the proposed four parenting styles are: authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and neglectful.The authoritative style comes from the union between the demandingness and responsiveness at a high level.Authoritative parents base their relationship with their children on mutual respect, establishing open communication, while not failing to monitor their behavior, correcting negative attitudes and gratifying positive ones.The authoritarian style is characterized by high demandingness and little responsiveness, authoritarian parents tend to be more rigid by establishing strict and more demanding rules, tend to seek the respect and obedience of the children through authority, do not demonstrate much affection and act little understanding towards the children's opinions and questions.The indulgent style is characterized by low demandingness and high responsiveness, ie, as opposed to authoritarian parents, they do not determine rules and limits, do not demand responsibility or maturity of the children, end up satisfying their demands, are perceived as loving, affectionate, communicative and more tolerant, letting the child control their own behavior.Finally, the negligent style is characterized by low responsiveness and low demandingness.Parents who adopt this style have little involvement in the socialization of children, seeming to be more focused on their own interests, not being neither emotional nor demanding, only responding to the basic needs of their children.
In adolescence, parenting practices remain essential to the development of both health and risk behaviors.A national study with teenagers tried to investigate the predictive power of the maternal and paternal practices on risk and health behavior in adolescents.The results suggested that education strategies are predictive of internalizing and externalizing behaviors, social competence and behavior issues (Toni & Silvares, 2013).Another study, a theoretical review of parenting styles and practices, indicated that the use of power just with the objective of legitimizing the authority may not have much effect in adolescence as it had in childhood.Parents who use discipline strategies that give autonomy seem to have greater results (Alvarenga et al., 2016).
In a sample of adolescents from good socioeconomic status and good levels of family relationships, high levels of parental responsiveness and demandingness were found, both from the adolescents point of view as the parents, indicating that affection and demand are influential factors for the development of autonomy (Barbosa, Neumann, Alves, Teixeira, & Wagner, 2017).Thus, the literature converges in stating that the authoritative style, which combines high parental responsiveness and high demandingness, is the best parental education model considering the development of adolescent autonomy, social skills and protection for development of internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Alvarenga et al., 2016;Patias, Smith, & Day, 2012).
Considering the scientific evidence, the healthy development in adolescence is related to how parents raise and accompany their children, which make it important to foster studies on this phenomenon.This aspect deserves attention, especially in adolescence, which is a development period in which there is a natural detachment between the children and parents, when they first need to seek other standards and values in the pursuit of constructing their own identity and autonomy (Barreto & Rabelo, 2015).Thus, the parenting strategies need flexibility to respond to the developmental period in which the children are.
Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate the parenting style adopted by caregivers of adolescents, through the cross between demandingness and responsiveness, as well as by gender and age group.

Design and Participants
This is a quantitative cross-sectional study, in which 296 adolescents aged 14 to 19 years (M= 16.03, SD= 0.96), participated.169 (57%) were female and most of them 194 (66%) from public schools, all high school students.As for the level of education, 48% (143) were students of the second year, 29% (85) of the third year and 23% (68) of the first year.The students in the sample studied in schools in Passo Fundo-RS and surrounding area.To be included in the sample, they needed to be attending high school (1st, 2nd or 3rd year) and have a maximum age of 20 years, considering the chronology criterion of the World Health Organization (WHO) to define adolescence.Students with disabilities (considered as "inclusion" students by the school) were excluded from the sample.

Instruments
The adolescents responded to a sociodemographic data sheet, which contained questions related to their gender, information on schooling, failure, abandonment, school concepts and issues about family.In addition, they responded to a Parental Responsiveness and Demandingness Scale (Teixeira et al., 2004) in order to assess parental responsiveness and demandingness from the adolescents' perception.It has 24 items to be answered on a Likert scale of five points, in which adolescents respond about the father and the mother.In this study, Cronbach's alpha indicated good internal consistency of the instrument, ranging between 0.78 and 0.92.

Data Analysis
The data was analysed statistically, with descriptive analyzes (means, standard deviations) and hypothesis t testing (Student t test) on Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22.0.First, we computed the data for the descriptive analyzes.The scores on parental demandingness and responsiveness were used to determine the parental styles, according to a previous study (Pacheco et al., 2008).Parents (mothers and fathers) who had high level of responsiveness and demandingness were classified as authoritative or competent; the parents who had low levels in both dimensions were classified as neglectful; parents who had low responsiveness and high demandingness, were classified as authoritarian and those with high responsiveness and low demandingness were classified as permissive.In this process, the demandingness and responsiveness scores were combined to determine the parenting style of the couple.However, we also investigated scores in responsiveness and demandingness for father and mother separately.
We performed a frequency analysis of the parental styles, and Student t test for independent samples in order to compare if there were statistically significant differences between dimensions of parenting (responsiveness and demandingness) by gender and age groups.The age range was computed from the median in the sample, dividing teenagers into two age groups: younger (14-16 years) and older (17-19 years).In all analyzes, we calculated the effect size for the mean difference through Cohen d considering values higher than or equal to 0.80 as large effect size; 0.20 to 0.80 as medium size effect and less than 0.20 as small (Lindenau & Guimarães, 2012).

Procedures and Ethical considerations
This study was derived from a larger study entitled "What motivates adolescents to learn and stay in school" which aimed to investigate the motivation to learn and the associated variables.It was approved by Ethics Commitee (CEP) of an institution of Higher Education in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul under the number CAAE 56453116.4.0000.5319.After its approval, the project's objectives were presented to the schools, which were chosen by convenience from the researchers' network of contacts.With their approval, we agreed on dates and times to invite the students to participate.At the meeting with the students the project's objectives were explained and how their participation was voluntary.To those who agreed to participate, we delivered two copies of the Informed Consent Form (ICF) to be signed by their caretakers consenting to their participation and a Consent Agreement (CA), agreeing with their own participation.The research team went back to the schools to collect the ICFs and CAs and schedule the data collection, according to the possibilities of the students and the schools' acceptance.The data collection took place in dates and rooms previously agreed upon with the schools and the students and were conducted collectively with an average duration of 50 minutes.
At the time of data collection, to answer Scale of Parental Responsiveness Demandingness, we asked the teens to think of male and female figures who educate them or are responsible for their education.Eight teenagers did not respond (left blank) the about the father and one teenager did not answer about the mother.These nine protocols were excluded from the sample.

Results
The analysis indicated the parenting styles used by the adolescents' caregivers, combining the dimensions of responsiveness and demandingness.The parents were classified into four parenting styles: authoritative/competent (high demandingness and high responsiveness); authoritarian (high demandingness and low responsiveness); permissive (low demandingness and high responsiveness) and neglectful (low demandingness and low responsiveness).The descriptive analysis indicated that most of the parents in the sample were perceived as negligent with 33.1% (N=94), followed by authoritative/competent with 32.7% (N=93), 17.3% were authoritarian (N=49) and 16.9% permissive (N=48).Next, an analysis of the dimensions of parenting (responsiveness and demandingness) in relation to gender was performed.The results are shown in Table 1.
The Student's t test analysis results for independent samples in regard to the dimensions and genders showed no statistically significant differences on any of the investigated dimensions.Then, Student's t test was performed to compare the dimensions of demandingness and responsiveness of father, mother and matched by age (younger and older teens) (see Table 2).
The results indicate that younger adolescents see their mothers as more demanding when compared to older teens.The magnitude of the effect of this difference was medium (d=0.39).The same occurs in the combined demandingness.Regarding the father's demandingness and responsiveness, mother's responsiveness and combined responsiveness, no statistically significant differences were found.

Discussion
The findings on this study show data that are relevant to understanding the phenomenon which is the relationship between parental responsiveness and demandingness and the adolescence.The high percentage of parents perceived as negligent is noteworthy, which is evidenced when combining responsiveness and demandingness.This result may indicate a frailty in the relationship between parents and their children, and a need for intervention with parents who do not use boundaries, nor affection in their education practices.In the negligent parenting style, low responsiveness and demandingness can be seen in the little involvement parents have in the socialization of their children, not showing neither affection nor demands, only answering to the basic needs of their children (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).The literature indicates that this method of education has negative impact in several areas of the psychosocial development of children and adolescents, such as school performance, psychopathology and social adjustment.Facing this kind of parental intervention, the children do not internalize the social rules and moral standards required for a good psychological development.
Parental  CAN, 2006).In addition, the negligent parenting style may be associated with physical punishment, caregivers using alcohol and drugs, as well as the adolescents developing an infractional behavior (Pacheco, 2004).On the other hand, this study's results have indicated that there was a high percentage of parents which were considered authoritative/competent by the teenagers.On the authoritative/competent parenting style, Baumrind (1997) states that by offering a high degree of responsiveness and demandingness, this style brings beneficial results, and so it has eventually become a reference model for raising children, with the best effects on their development.For example, the recent study by Barbosa et al. (2017) showed that the relationships between parents and children which are based on affection and consistent and achievable demands may lead to the development of the adolescent's autonomy.
When it comes to the dimensions of parenting by gender, the results in our research found no statistically significant differences, which is in agreement with other researches.Studies have shown that in the perception by gender, mothers tend to be more responsive and demanding than fathers for both sexes (Costa et al., 2000;Pacheco, et al., 2008;Teixeira et al., 2004).However, girls gave higher scores of maternal responsiveness than boys (Teixeira et al., 2004), whereas in the study by Reichert and Wagner (2007), the father's responsiveness is greater with the male child.This result indicates that girls seem to be more positively monitored by their mothers and the boys by their fathers, assuming a gender identification between mother-daughter and father-son, which probably facilitates parental interaction (Sampaio & Vieira, 2010).However there is a greater demandingness toward the girls, both from mother and father (Costa et al., 2000;Tan et al., 2004;Weber et al., 2004).One can think of a cultural explanation, in which girls are usually thought of as more fragile and therefore would need more care.The difference in demandingness shows that parents control the girls more than the boys, showing the possible influence of a macho culture, in which boys get greater freedom (Weber et al., 2004).
On the other hand, some researches show that parental responsiveness and demandingness are perceived equally by adolescents.This may suggest that, currently, parents may be educating their children more evenly, assuming no differences between the genders (Soares & Almeida, 2011;Vasconcelos-Raposo et al., 2015).It may also indicate decreasing sexual stereotypes, ie, the idea that boys are more autonomous, and therefore require less supervision, and the girls are considered more vulnerable, needing more care.
Finally, the analyzes that relate rdemandingness and responsiveness of parents combined by age group showed that younger adolescents perceive their parents as more demanding when compared to older teens.Studies conducted in the area revealed that parental support is influenced throughout the ageing of adolescents, ie, older adolescents perceive their parents as less demanding and responsive (Goede et al., 2009;Vasconcelos-Raposo, Teixeira, Lima, Monteiro, 2015).These results can be related to the fact that during adolescence there is less control and parental authority, the parent-child relationship becomes more equal, since this familial stage demands greater parental flexibility, modulating the authority and setting flexible boundaries in order to create opportunities for increased independence and development for the adolescents.To make this possible, it is necessary that parents understand their individuality, giving them the freedom to experience challenges independently, without help, and guide and support in situations where they can not handle their lives alone (Cole & Cole, 2004;Cruz, 2007;Marty, 2006;Pratta & Santos, 2007).

Final considerations
The study of family relationships in the children's adolescent period is of great interest to the scientific community and society when it comes to human development and behavior.In this quantitative and descriptive study, we found data that enables us to understand the perception of adolescents on how parents educate them.From these results, it is possible to discern different possibilities and perspectives.
The balance in perceiving parents as neglectful and authoritative/competent shows that, in this sample, the adolescents deal with contrasting styles.In the face of numerous changes in the structure and dynamics established in contemporary families, this is a point that deserves attention since negligent parents are those with low levels of responsiveness and demandingness.Those are the parents who do not exercise the duty of caring for the children so they can have a proper development.In fact, in terms of developmental outcomes, it is the parenting style that causes more harm to children and adolescents.Considering the characteristics of the adolescents in this sample, maybe their parents are more focused on their own subjective demands and personal goals, leaving aside the needs of the children.In this sense, it is necessary to elucidate to the parents on their role in the adolescent's development and the importance of staying present and constant in the lives of their children.
On the other hand, the percentage of authoritative/competent parents was significant in this sample, depicting another group of parents.Those are the parents interested in finding reliable information on parenting, human development and the effects of the different ways to educate, using protective strategies in childcare.These authoritative/competent parents may be managing to act on the development of their children both equally and protectively, by being responsive and demanding.
Considering that this work was carried out from the perspective of adolescents regarding parental responsiveness and demandingness, it is necessary to take into account that there may be an incompatibility of perceptions and thoughts in the parent-child relationship, that is, the child's view about the parental behaviors may be different from the view that parents have of themselves.Although studies have shown that the correlation between the answers given by the children and their parents (father and mother) present the same pattern of ideas (Weber et al., 2004), we suggest that future works include the points of view of both the parents and the adolescents.
The fact that younger adolescents have a more demanding perception than older adolescents may address the greater conflicts experienced in early adolescence.Teens find themselves facing subjective and biological issues, which can cause an inner conflict that can extrapolate and influence their way of seeing the world.Parents, on the other hand, when facing a child entering adolescence may feel challenged and worried, which could impact the level of demandingness directed at the child.In this context, we suggest that them both could search for a refugee for their cravings and, if needed, psychological attention.
The study of the phenomenon at focus does not end.On the contrary, it broadens the understanding and gives space for new investigations aiming to fill remaining gaps.In this study we could not relate the dimensions of parenting with other influential variables such as socioeconomic level, familial configuration, mental health levels of the adolescents, among others.This limitation may serve as a suggestion for future studies.Also, the studies should include adolescents from various regions of the country, taking into consideration the cultural differences that may influence the way parents educate their children, as well as hearing adolescents from different schools.

Table 2
Mean, Standard Deviation and Student t test comparing the dimensions demandingness and responsiveness by age group