PARENTING STYLES OF IN-SCHOOL ADOLESCENTS IN SOUTH-EAST NIGERIA

The study investigated parenting styles of in-school adolescents in south-East, Nigeria. Three research questions were formulated to guide the study at .05 level of significance. The study adopted a survey research design. The population for the study consisted 137,095 in-school adolescents in secondary school in South East, Nigeria. The sample for the study was 1200 senior secondary school II adolescents. The instrument for data collection was a 53-item questionnaire. The instrument was validated by three experts, two from the department of educational foundations, and one from the department of science education, all from faculty of Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Mean and standard deviation were used for data analysis. The study reveals, among others, that the parenting styles in-school adolescents were exposed to were authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. The study recommended, among others, that more school counselors should be employed and retained through in-service training programmes, capacity building workshops and refresher courses on adolescent value and moral upbringing.


Introduction
Parenting is a very tough job. Despite the obvious joys, the everyday challenges of bringing up a child or children can sometimes be overwhelming and beyond human endurance. Based on the difficulty involved in parenting, parents should choose the best parenting style in order to achieve positive result. Parents have been identified to have a critical role in the task of inculcating positive (sexual) values in the adolescents.
Adolescent has been defined variously by many authors. According to United Nations Family Planning Association, (2007) and World Health Organization (WHO) (2009), an adolescent is a young person between 10-19 years with his or her own views and evolving decision making capacities. This is often a stage when conflict and tensions arise and adolescents become identified as problematic by parents. An adolescent is also defined by Hornby, (2000) as a person growing up from childhood to adulthood (12 or 13years) with drastic changes in the social, emotional and cognitive aspects. Adolescents increase their ability to think abstractly and eventually make plans and set long-term goals. The ages which are considered to be part of adolescence vary by cultural and religious beliefs and orientation and this ranges from 13 years up to 19years, or even earlier in some cases. Deducing from the perspectives of Ncheta (2004), it can be concluded that the central tendency in virtually all definitions of adolescent is the indication of age range from 13-19years, which thereby justifies the adoption of the term teenage in reference to adolescents. Adolescence is usually used interchangeably with youth. These adolescents can also be called young persons and in secondary schools they are called in-school adolescents. However, in-school adolescents are adolescents in the four walls of secondary schools. These in-school adolescents cannot be left at the fate of the school environment for proper upbringing rather, it should go beyond school and peer influence to home and parental influence.
Parenting is the emotional climate in which parents raise their children. These emotional climates are usually characterized by different parenting styles (Christopher, 2005). Parenting styles are complex activities that include much specific behaviour that work together to influence a child (Rodriguez & Crowley, 2009). Parenting styles are ways and manner, parents guide, monitor, nurture and direct the upbringing of their children/wards based on their values, beliefs and cultural background (Yakubu, 2018). Parenting style is defined by Ncheta (2011) as the manner by which parents raise their children, which may depend on the parent's level of expectations, performance, domains, and attentiveness to rule as well as the style of discipline that the parents utilize to enforcing their expectations. Maccobay and Martin (1983) assert that parenting styles capture two important elements of parenting: parental responsiveness and parental demandingness.
Parental responsiveness (also regarded as parental warmth or supportiveness) refers to the extent to which parents intentionally foster individuality, self-reputation and self-assertion by being attuned, supportive and acquiescent to children's special needs and demands (Baumrid, 1991). Baumrid, further stressed that parental demandingness also refers to as behavioural control refers to the claims parents make on children to become integrated into the family, by their maturity, demands, supervision, disciplinary efforts and willingness to confront the child who disobeys. Baumrid (1991) goes further to state that each of these parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative and permissive) reflects different naturally occurring patterns of parental values, practices and behaviours and a distinct balance of responsiveness and demandingness. According to Baumrid (1991), indulgent parents (also referred to as "permissive or nondirective" are more responsive than they are demanding. They are nontraditional and lenient, do not require mature behaviour, allow considerable self -regulation and avoid confrontation. More so, Baumrid asserts that indulgent parents may be further divided into two types: democratic parents, who though lenient, are more conscientious, engaged and committed to the child, and nondirective parents who are laissez-faire, nonchalant and carefree in their attitude towards the affairs of their children. Authoritarian parents are highly demanding and directive, but not responsive. They are rigid and controlling and they demand a lot from their children without offering warmth or responding to a child's need. They are obedience and status-oriented and expect their orders to be obeyed without explanation. These parents provide wellordered and structured environment with clearly stated rules. Authoritarian parents can be divided into two types, non-authoritative directive, which are directive but not intrusive or autocratic in their use of power, and authoritarian directive, which are highly intrusive. In expansion to parenting styles, Maccobay and Martins (1983) added uninvolved parents (uninvolved parenting style) which are low in both responsiveness and demandingness.
One key difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting is in the dimension of psychological control. Both authoritarian and authoritative parents place high demands on their children and expect their children to behave appropriately and obey parental rules. Authoritarian parents, however, also expect their children to accept their judgments, values and goals without questioning. In contrast authoritative parents are more open to give and take with their children and make greater use of explanation. They usually set high expectations and unlike the authoritarian, they are responsive to their child's needs, they are flexible, they listen and give advice, they encourage their children to be independent and assisting while also being respectful to others. They rely on reason not force. Operationally, parenting styles are parenting patterns that show how parents respond to and demand from their children which later influence their behaviour. In lieu of the above discussion on parenting styles exhibited by most parents in training their children, yet there is threat and challenges in the foundation of our societal values and morals. Undoubtedly, posterity of the younger generation is still in doubt, hence there is need for the present study. Cognizant of the contribution already made by existing studies in seeking to ascertain the effect of some parenting styles in the upbringing of adolescents and motivated by the need to fill a gap in knowledge, this study is set to ascertain parenting styles of in-school adolescent in South East Nigeria.

Purpose of the Study
The main purpose of the study is to find out the parenting styles of in-school adolescent in South Eastern, Nigeria. Specifically, the study seeks to: 1) Determine the parenting styles of in-school adolescents.
2) Determine the extent parenting styles of in-school adolescent is dependent on gender. 3) Determine the extent parenting styles of in-school adolescent is dependent on location.

Scope of the Study
The content scope of this study focuses on the parenting styles of in-school adolescents in South Eastern Nigeria. This study covered gender and different locations. The geographical scope of this study was limited to in-school adolescents in South Eastern Nigeria.

Research Questions
The research questions that guided this study are as follows: 1) What are the parenting styles of in-school adolescents?
2) To what extent is parenting styles of in-school adolescent dependent on gender?
3) To what extent is parenting styles of in-school adolescents dependent on location?

Methods
The design of the study was a survey research design. Survey research design according to Alio (2008) and Nworgu (2015) is one in which a group of people or items are studied by collecting and analyzing data from only a few people or items considered to be representative of the entire group. The design was used in order to collect the opinion of the respondents regarding the parenting styles of in-school adolescent in South Eastern, Nigeria. The population was 137,095 in-school adolescents in senior secondary school in South East, Nigeria. The sample for the study was 1200 senior secondary school adolescents. The sampling procedure adopted in this study was multistage sampling. First, the area was stratified into five strata: Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo states. However, the researcher randomly drew three states from the strata: Ebonyi, Anambra and Enugu. From each of the States randomly selected, one education zone was randomly selected, and in each education zone, two local government areas were also randomly chosen. Again, from each of the randomly selected local governments, two secondary schools were selected randomly making it a total of four secondary schools from the two local government areas. This also gave a total of four secondary schools from each of the states selected and total of twelve secondary schools from the three states randomly selected. Thus, from twelve secondary schools selected, 100 (SS2) students were derived from each school, thereby giving a total sample of 1200 students. The choice of this class of students is based on the fact that they are at the prime of their adolescence.
The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire developed by the researchers after an extensive literature review (PSQ). The questionnaire contained 53 items of four clusters of A-authoritarian, B-authoritative, C-permissive, and D-neglectful with response mode of Strongly Agree (SA) 4, Agree (A) 3, Disagree (D) 2, and Strongly Disagree (SD) 1. The instrument was validated by three experts, two from the Department of Educational Foundations, and one from the Department of Science Education (Measurement and Evaluation Unit) all from Faculty of Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. These experts looked at the purpose and the specific objectives of the study, research questions, hypotheses, appropriateness of languages and expressions, clarity of statements as well as the relevance of the sections and items on the instruments and the ability to elicit the required information. These experts constructively scrutinized the instruments and made important corrections and useful suggestions that helped to improve the quality of the instruments. To determine the reliability of the instrument internal consistency reliability was conducted, thirty in-school adolescents from senior secondary school II in Makurdi in Benue State Nigeria, which is outside the area of the study were selected and the instruments administered to them to enable the researcher generate data for computing the reliability index. Internal consistency reliability was calculated using the Cronbach alpha correlation. The rationale for the use of Cronbach alpha was on the basis that the items were not scored right or wrong (dichotomously) but rather were placed on a four point rating scale of SA, A, D and SD. The analysis of the data yielded reliability coefficient indices of 0.66 indicating that the instrument was suitable for data collection which is above 0.05.
Copies of the instruments were administered to the respondents using direct delivery and retrieval method. The distributions of the questionnaire to the sampled students were done personally by the researchers with the help of two research assistants. The use of research assistants is to facilitate the distribution and retrieval of the completed copies of questionnaire. The research assistants were instructed on the objectives of the study.
Mean and standard deviation were used to analyze research questions 1, 2 and 3. In using mean, real limit of numbers was used whereby 0.00-0.49 indicates strongly disagreed, 1.00-1.49 indicates disagreed, 2.0-2.49 indicates agreed, 3.00-4.00 indicates strongly agreed. The standard deviation was used to test the deviation from the mean of the responses.

Results
The results obtained from data analysis were presented in the table 1, 2 and 3 respectively based on the research questions that guided the study.

Research Question 1:
What are the parenting styles of in-school adolescents? The result in Table 1A shows the mean ratings of respondents on parenting styles of inschool adolescents. The mean ratings and standard deviation of respondents on item numbers 1, 3 -12, 14 and 15 ranging between 3.50 to 3.85 and 0.43 to 0.50 respectively, revealed that the respondents Strongly Agreed (SA) on the items highlighted above as a parenting styles of in-school adolescents. Meanwhile, the mean ratings on item number 13 with a mean of 2.00 and standard deviation of 0.25 respectively revealed that the respondents Agreed with the item highlighted above. Furthermore, the mean rating of 1.12 and standard deviation of 0.32 for item 2 revealed that the respondents disagreed with the item highlighted as authoritarian parenting style. Based on the analysis in the table above, there is a grand mean score of 3.24 and standard deviation of 0.50 were reached. It revealed that the respondents strongly agreed with the items in the table 1A as the authoritarian parenting style of in-school adolescent in South East Nigeria. The result in Table 1B shows the mean ratings of respondents on parenting styles of inschool adolescents. The mean ratings and standard deviation of respondents on item numbers 2-13, ranging between 3.50 to 4.00 and 0.00 to 0.50 respectively, revealed that the respondents Strongly Agreed (SA) on the items highlighted above as a parenting styles of in-school adolescents. However, respondents agree and strongly disagree on items 1 and 14, with the mean ratings and standard deviation values of 3.08, 1.00 and 0.26, 0.00 respectively. On the Grand mean score of 3.50 with standard deviation value of 0.27 respondents Strongly Agreed (SA) on items in Table 1B as the authoritative parenting styles of in-school adolescents in South East Nigeria. The result in Table 1C shows the mean ratings of respondents on parenting styles of inschool adolescents. The mean ratings and standard deviation of respondents on item numbers 1, 5-7 ranging between 3.45 to 3.50 and 0.50 to 0.62 respectively, revealed that the respondents Strongly Agreed (SA) on the items highlighted above as a parenting styles of in-school adolescents. However, the mean ratings of items numbers 9 and 10 with mean of 2,26 and 2.28 and standard deviation of 0.82 and 1.29 respectively revealed that the respondents Agreed with the item highlighted above. Meanwhile, the mean ratings on item numbers 2-4, 8 which ranges between 1.06-1.54, with corresponding standard deviation values of 0.23 to 1.50, revealed that, respondents Disagreed (D) and Agree on the item highlighted above as a parenting styles of in-school adolescents. Based on the Grand mean score of 2.41 with standard deviation value of 0.60 respondents agreed on items in table 1C as the parenting styles of in-school adolescents in South East Nigeria. The result in Table 1D shows the mean ratings of respondents on parenting styles of inschool adolescents. The mean ratings and standard deviation of respondents on item numbers 1-4, 6-10 and 13-14 ranging between 1.07 to 1.57 and 0.05 to 0.60 respectively, revealed that the respondents Disagreed (D) on the items highlighted above as a neglectful parenting styles of in-school adolescents. However, respondents agreed on items 5, 11 and 12 with the mean ratings and standard deviation values of 2.50, 2.53, 2.00 and 0.50, 0.50 and 0.00 respectively. Based on the Grand mean score of 1.64 with standard deviation value of 0.42 respondents Disagreed on items in table 1D as the parenting styles of in-school adolescents in South East Nigeria.

Research Question 2:
To what extent is parenting style of in-school adolescent dependent on gender? The analysis of data collected on the research question 2 above shows that the parenting styles had grand mean of 2.78 for male and 2.61 for female adolescents. This implies that all the responses are above 2.50 of the decision point. This shows that gender is not a determinant factor of parenting styles of in-school adolescent in South eastern, Nigeria. Also, the grand standard deviation is 0.52 for male and 0.39 for female adolescents showing that the students are close in their opinion.

Research Question 3:
To what extent is parenting style of in-school adolescent dependent on location? The result of data in Table 3 shows that the identified parental styles had grand mean of 2.86 for urban adolescents and 2.88 for rural adolescents. This implies that the location is not a determinant factor of parental styles of in-school adolescent in south eastern, Nigeria. Also, the grand standard deviation of both urban and rural (0.70 & 0.71) adolescents' dwellers showing that the students opinion are homogeneous.

Summary of the Findings
The findings of the study revealed the following: • The parenting styles in-school adolescents were exposed to were authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. • Gender is not a determinant factor of parenting styles of in-school adolescent in south eastern, Nigeria. • Location is not a determinant factor of parenting styles of in-school adolescent in south eastern, Nigeria.

Discussion of Findings
The findings of the study are discussed in line with the research questions that guided the study. They are discussed under the following sub-headings: • Constituents of parenting styles of in-school adolescents, • Parenting styles of in-school adolescent based on gender, • Parenting styles of in-school adolescent based on location.

Constituents of Parenting Styles of In-School Adolescents
In line with the research question on the parenting styles of in-school adolescents, authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles constitute the parenting styles of in-school adolescents in South-East, Nigeria. These findings show the prevalence of authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting style which support the study of Perozzi (2007) on the behaviour of adolescent based on the type of parenting style exhibited by parents but differ because the current study highlighted the constituents of the parenting style while, Perozzi's study only examine the behaviour of adolescent based on the type of parenting style. Also, the linear regression analyses which revealed that parental monitoring accounted for most of the variance with both drinking variables shows that Perozzi studies only relationship behaviour of adolescent based on the type of parenting style.

Parenting Styles of In-school Adolescent Based on Gender
The findings of the study according to research question two shows that gender is not a determinant factor of parental style of in-school adolescents in south eastern, Nigeria. The finding of the study is in agreement with Kriti & Samina Bano (2016) who state that no significant difference was seen in mother's authoritarian parenting style between sons and daughters.

Parenting Styles of In-school Adolescent Based on Location
The findings of this study according to research question three shows that location is not a determinant factor to the parenting styles of in-school adolescent in South Eastern Nigeria. The findings of the study are in consonance with Dohmen, Gelteyry, Hindal, Pfan & Richter (2019) who concluded in their result that parents do not choose parental styles based on their environment but on their circumstances (policy makers, pedagogies and other pafental advisors).

Implications of the Findings
The findings of this study have tremendous implications for the researchers, adolescents, parents (family), government, guidance/counsellor and society at large.
Since, Authoritative and Authoritarian Parenting styles are the parenting styles used then parents will be able to openly criticize their children when their behaviour does not meet their expectation always. Also, parents will consider their children's opinion when plans are being made for their family, as gender and location made no impact in parenting styles used.

Conclusion
It has become a common maxim that the youths are the leaders of tomorrow. This statement imposes enormous demands and tasks on the parents in particular in the proper upbringing of the leaders of tomorrow. This study focused on the parenting styles of in-school adolescents in south east, Nigeria. The study identified the authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles as common based on the data collected for the study.
Cognizant of the above, the study is of the conclusion that no single type of parenting style is self-sufficient in the effective parental upbringing of the adolescents. Therefore, there is a call for proper integration and interaction amongst the various parenting styles above mentioned depending on the situation and demands of the moment. The study suggests penultimately the co-operation and involvement of parents, religious leaders, school authorities and the counsellors to synergize in ensuring proper adolescents upbringing.

Recommendations
On the basis of the findings of this study, the following recommendations were made: • Parents should not use only one parenting style. Rather, they should use a combination of three types of parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian and laissez-fair) that would result to eclectic parenting style". This is because, in actual sense of a home, there would be situation where each of the parenting styles would be applied. • More school counselors should be employed and retrained through in-service training programmes, capacity building workshops and refresher courses on adolescent value and moral upbringing. • The school authority should print and provide school guidance counselors with adequate materials (furniture for administrative and counseling conveniences; file cabinet for record keeping, notice board for information dissemination; log book; advertisement forms to enlighten students on service in counseling centre, files; counseling records; registration form; request form for counseling interview, case report sheet, consultation form, and appointment slip.) to carry out their functions effectively. • Religious and community leaders should be co-opted into committee that will enlighten the in-school adolescence on the disadvantages of engaging in unethical behaviour. • Parents should also be educated through seminars, and workshop on the best way to train the in-school adolescents knowing full well their challenges. • Government should ensure that school environment becomes friendly. The schools should be operated on a very strict rules and regulations.