Appraisal of Child rearing practices - A gender analysis

Abstract

Child-rearing practices is a generalized term used to refer to characteristic ways of handling or dealing with one’s children The present study tries to find out if there exist any gender differences in the way children perceive the way in which they are reared. The sample used in the study consisted of 650 school and college going teenagers belonging to the age group from 13 years to 19 years. It included 331 males and 319 females. It also included students from urban and rural areas, from different religions, with different orders of birth and from different socioeconomic status

The main scale used was Child-Rearing Practices Scale (Student Appraisal Form) constructed by George and Sananda Raj (2006). This measured the child-rearing practices of parents as perceived by their children in 13 different areas or sections, namelyAcceptance, Punishment, Protectiveness, Responsibility, Responsiveness, Reward, Understanding, Non-critical, Permissiveness, Encouragement, Rapport, Emotional Stability and Patience and thus gave 13 scores for the child-rearing practices.

It was seen whether there was any difference in males and females regarding how they perceived the child rearing practices of their parents, both father and mother. The means and standard deviations of both males and females in the entire child rearing sub variables were calculated in terms of both father and mother and it could be seen that there was difference in all the child rearing practices. Except in one variable, females as a group had a higher mean score than the males. In order to find whether these differences in the means were significant or not, the t-test was done. The results of the t-test showed that among the 26 sub variables of child rearing practices, except 7 sub variables all the other 19 sub variables were significantly different in the two sexes. The variables which were perceived as similar or which were not perceived as different by both males and females include, acceptance shown by father, reward given by mother, understanding shown both by father and mother, encouragement shown by both father and mother and the rapport established by father. All the other variables were experienced as different by male students and female students, with females having higher scores than males in all the variables, except one, which is giving responsibility.