Abstract:
Around the world, parents have different ideologies of what is appropriate and inappropriate when it comes to parenting their children. Parenting styles may predict a child’s well being in the domains of social competence, psychosocial development and academic performance. Parents therefore have a leading role to play in the overall development of the child. The patterns of parenting styles are authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and indulgent. The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception of secondary school students on effects of parenting styles on secondary school students’ academic performance in Rongo Division, Rongo District in Nyanza province of Kenya .The study employed descriptive survey design. The total numbers of secondary schools in the division were 22, while the entire population of secondary school students in the division was 5325. The study used a sample of 341 out of 3000 forms 3 and 4 students. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select 10 secondary schools from the 22 schools in the division Stratified random sampling was also used to select respondents to reflect gender in each sampled school. Respondents from each stratum were selected by simple random sampling. Questionnaires were used to collect data from forms 3 and fonn 4 students. These instruments were pre-tested to ascertain the reliability at 0.8 level of significance. Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics such as fiequencies, percentages, graphs and means. For inferential statistics, Pearson- Product Moment Correlation was used to establish association between parenting styles and academic performance at 0.05 level of significance. The results showed that authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles as perceived by secondary school students had significance influence on their academic performance. The study recommends that Guidance and counselling on effects of parenting styles on students’ academic performance should be a matter of concern for parents, teachers and students.
