ABSTRACT

 The study investigated parenting style as a correlate ofschool adjustment and academic achievement among secondary school students in Umuahia Education zone of Abia state. The purpose of the study was to ascertain the extent authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, situational and equalitarian parenting styles correlate with school adjustment and academic achievement among secondary school students. Six research questions and six null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a correlational research design. A total of 806 senior secondary class one students were drawn from a targeted population of 8,018 for the study. Two instruments titled “Parenting Style and School Adjustment Questionnaire (PSSAQ) and Parenting Style and Academic Achievement Questionnaire (PSAAQ) were developed and validated for the study. The internal consistency of the items was determined using Cronbach’s Alpha method which yielded reliability estimates of 0.79 and 0.83 for PSSAQ and PSAAQ, respectively. The research questions and hypothesis were answered using Pearson’s product moment correlation and multiple regressions were used for data analysis, the level of significance was set at 0.05. Results indicated Result showed that there was a significant relationship between authoritative parenting style adjustments with a high positive correction of 0.86, also authoritarian parenting style has a significant positive relationship with school adjustment with r =0.78, permissive parenting style has a significant positive relationship with school adjustment with r=0.81 situational parenting style had a positive significant relationship with r =0.71, also equilateral parenting style had a significant relationship with school adjustment where r =0.79 also the Multiple regression and ANOVA on the combined influence of parenting styles were significant. Also the result in the hypothesis revealed that all the parenting style had a positive significant relationship with academic achievement where authoritative with r = 0.68, authoritarian with r =0.83, permissive with correlation of 0.88, situational parenting style with r =0.88, situational parenting style with r =0.76, also equilateral parenting style had r = 0.69, while the combined influence ofthe 5 parenting style had significant influence on academic achievement since all the 5 predictor variable had their P value < 0.05. A major educational implication of the study was that parenting styles could correlate with school adjustment and academic achievement ofstudents. It was thus recommended that parents should adopt situational or authoritarian parenting style for proper school adjustment and academic achievement of their wards. The respondents’ unwillingness to complete the questionnaire and provide the correct information, thereby delaying the collection of the data on record time influenced the conclusions while replication ofthis study in other parts ofthe country to find out the correlation among parenting styles, school adjustment and academic achievement of senior secondary school students in different population was recommended based on the finding