Child Response Styles to Parenting

There seem to be overt attention on parenting and numerous studies on the effects of parenting on child’s behaviors and performances. While a parenting style affects a child’s biopsychosociotechno-spiritual development, the child’s response to the parenting also matters. This is an area which seems to have been neglected by many researchers. Egunjobi (2021) thus proposed four child response styles to parenting namely: Adherer, Rejecter, Falser, and Nonchalant. This study is an attempt to substantiate Egunjobi’s proposition about child’s response styles to parenting. A survey design was employed to investigate the child response styles. The study targeted infinite population of anyone aged 11 and older. Through voluntary sampling, 276 persons responded to the online questionnaire administered via WhatsApp, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The data was descriptively analyzed using Percentages and were presented in Tables and Pie Charts. The findings revealed that the respondents identified as Adherers (65.5%), Rejecters (4.8%), Falser (17.2%), and Nonchalant (12.5%). Nonchalant is 100% a child response style to an uninvolved parenting. Although 96.9% indicated being well raised/trained, more than half (50.7%) of the respondents indicated that they would not raise their children the way they were raised. This is an indication that, although parenting styles have influence on the child upbringing, children may exhibit unique ways of responding to the parenting. Researchers are encouraged to do more investigations in this area of child response styles for better understanding of a child’s behaviors.