Effect of Parent-Child Communication Patterns on Junior Secondary School Students’ Self-Esteem in Mathematics

The study determined the effect of parent-child communication patterns on Junior Secondary School students’ achievement in mathematics. The study was guided by three (3) research questions and four (4) research hypotheses that were tested at 0.05 levels of significance. The design of the study is ex-post facto or causal comparative research design. The population of this study was four thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven (4867) Junior Secondary School 3 (JSS3) students in Enugu Education zone as at 2018/2019 academic session. The sample size of this study was three hundred and seventy (370) Junior Secondary School 3 (JSS3) students in four (4) sampled co-educational secondary schools in Enugu Education zone. The instrument used for data collection was Parental-Communication Pattern on Students’ Achievement and Self-esteem (PCPSAS) questionnaire that was developed by the researchers. The instrument was validated by three (3) experts in the Department of Science Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The reliability of the instrument was calculated as 0.83 using Chronbach Alpha. The data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while the hypotheses were tested using Analysis of Covariance at 0.05 level of significance. The study discovered that most parents adopted laissez-faire communication patterns as regards to their wards’ learning of Mathematics which made their wards to have low self-esteem in mathematics. The study also, discovered that there was no significant difference between the mean self-esteem scores of students whose parents adopted the different parent-child communication patterns on the students’ learning of Mathematics and there was also, no significant interaction between gender of students and their parent-child communication patterns on students’ mathematics self-esteem scores. Hence, the study recommended that parents and mathematics should adopt pluralistic or consensual parent-child communication patterns on their wards as regards to their wards’ learning of Mathematics in order to boost their self esteem in Mathematics.