Poster #154 - Adolescent Coping with Academic Failure: The Role of Parental Socialization of Coping

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

During adolescence, academic demands increase and greater importance is placed on academic achievement. Further, ecological changes stemming from school transitions (elementary to middle school), such as having multiple teachers and increased expectations of responsibilities, may create or exacerbate academic challenges for youth (Eccles et al., 1996). How youth navigate and cope with increasing academic demands can set the stage for their future achievement and success. Yet, surprisingly unexplored are contextual factors that might further understanding of how youth develop approaches for coping with academic challenges. Applying the socialization of coping framework (Kliewer et al., 1996), the present study investigated the association between parental socialization of coping with academic challenges and youth coping with academic failure, as well as differences by adolescent gender.

Participants included a community sample of 100 preadolescents (54% boys; Mage = 11.05 years, SD = .33; 43% ethnic minorities) and their parents (96% biological mothers, 85% biological fathers) who are part of an ongoing longitudinal study. For socialization of academic coping, mothers and fathers rated the extent to which they provided problem-solving (e.g., make a plan), help-seeking, and disengaged (e.g., don’t think about it) suggestions in response to three hypothetical academic challenge scenarios (forgot about or performed poorly on assignment, challenges with managing academic demands). Adolescents completed the Multidimensional Measure of Coping focused on academic failure (Skinner et al., 2013). The Strategizing, Help-Seeking, Comfort-Seeking, and Escape scales were used. Measures were reliable (αs > .72-.90).

Results from cross-sectional regression analyses (Table 1) revealed that mother-reported help-seeking suggestions positively predicted adolescent-reported strategizing and help-seeking coping, and marginally predicted comfort-seeking coping. Mother-reported problem-solving suggestions marginally predicted adolescent-reported help-seeking coping. Although main effects of fathers’ suggestions overall were not significant (p < .05), gender differences emerged revealing a relatively consistent pattern linking father-reported problem-solving and help-seeking suggestions with adolescent coping. Specifically, among girls, fathers’ problem-solving suggestions were positively associated with adolescent-reported strategizing, help-seeking, and comfort-seeking coping (Figures 1a-c, respectively). Father-reported help-seeking suggestions were also positively associated with adolescent girls’ comfort-seeking coping (Figure 1d).

This study extends studies on socialization of coping with general or alternative stressors (e.g., Abaied & Rudolph, 2011; Kliewer et al., 1996, 2006) to the academic domain. Results from this study revealed that mothers’ help-seeking suggestions for coping with academic challenges are linked with more adolescent-reported engaged coping (strategizing, help-seeking) for all youth. However, for fathers, problem-solving and help-seeking suggestions appeared to be more strongly linked with girls’ but not boys’ engaged coping, which may be due in part to girls’ tendencies to seek more advice/support compared with boys (Rose & Rudolph, 2006) and fathers’ role in providing more instrumental support (e.g., Steinberg, 2011). The few findings for adolescent-reported escape coping were mixed and will be discussed. Overall, findings provide insight about the importance of parents’ role in influencing how adolescents’ may coping with academic challenges, with more active and engaged parental suggestions yielding more engaged coping among adolescents. Additional analyses will examine whether parents’ socialization of coping has lasting effects on adolescent coping over time.

Authors

• Kelly M Tu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Tianying Cai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author