Maternal and Paternal Parenting Styles and Children’s Socio-Emotional Skills: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between East Asia and North America

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Learning Beyond the Classroom: Social-Emotional Development through Families, Culture, and Community Spaces

Proposal

This study investigates the differential and joint effects of maternal and paternal parenting styles on children’s socio-emotional skills (SEL) across cultural contexts, addressing a critical gap in comparative and international education. Socio-emotional skills—encompassing emotional regulation, collaboration, and task performance—are foundational to educational success and life outcomes. While prior research has predominantly focused on mothers, emerging evidence suggests that paternal behaviors may exert distinct or even stronger influences, particularly in changing family structures. This study integrates Social Learning Theory and Family Systems Theory, with special attention to the East Asian concept of guan parenting, to explore maternal and paternal effects both independently and in combination.
Data are drawn from the 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), focusing on 10,202 students aged 10 and 15 from four cities: Ottawa, Houston (North America), and Suzhou, Daegu (East Asia). Only students living with both parents were included to avoid conflating neglectful parenting with parental absence. Parenting styles—authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful—were identified for mothers and fathers separately via Latent Class Analysis (LCA) based on measures of warmth and control. Socio-emotional skills were assessed using the OECD framework derived from the Big Five model, covering five domains with robust psychometric reliability. Two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) estimated the effects of parenting styles, incorporating controls for student, class, and school-level covariates. Interaction terms captured joint maternal–paternal effects, with cultural context included as a moderator.
Findings reveal marked cultural and gender differences in parenting influences. In North America, maternal parenting exerted stronger overall effects on SEL than paternal parenting, with maternal permissive and authoritative styles positively associated with multiple SEL domains. Paternal permissive parenting in this context enhanced the benefits of maternal authoritative parenting, particularly for collaboration, open-mindedness, and engagement. In East Asia, paternal parenting was more influential overall, with paternal permissive styles showing consistent positive associations across SEL domains. Conversely, paternal authoritarian parenting had significant negative effects, while maternal authoritarian styles generally showed no association. Joint parenting effects also differed by region: in East Asia, combinations of two permissive parents produced the most favorable SEL outcomes, whereas two authoritarian parents were associated with the poorest results. The “strict father, kind mother” combination showed both enhancing and erosive patterns, improving openness but undermining task performance and sociability.

Authors

• Qian Nie, East China Normal University

• Shiqing Liu