The Effect of Parental Discipline Style on Mothers' Perceptions of Social Skills and Learning Motivation

The reported research is a quantitative study examining the effect of parental discipline style and its four dimensions—Demandingness, Enforcement, Punishment and Responsiveness—on mothers' perceptions of their children's social skills and learning motivation. The sample consisted of 99 mothers and 129 children aged 8–12 years. It was found that each of the four dimensions of parental discipline style was positively correlated with learning motivation and social skills after controlling for sociodemographic background variables. Learning motivation was the most strongly and positively correlated with Enforcement and most weakly correlated with Demandingness, whereas social skills were most strongly positively correlated with Responsiveness and most weakly correlated with Enforcement. Responsiveness was found to be the major predictor of learning motivation as well as social skills, and was strongly and positively correlated with both.