Mothers’ and fathers’ well-being, parenting styles, and their children’s cognitive and behavioural strategies at primary school

One-hundred and five 6- to 7-year-old children were given a test measuring their helplessness, failure expectations, task-irrelevant behaviour, lack of persistence and search for social support in a classroom setting in order to examine the impact of parental well-being and parenting styles on the children’s cognitive and behavioural strategies at school. Both parents were also asked to fill in scales measuring their depression, parenting stress and parenting styles. The results revealed that maternal depressive symptomatology was associated with their children’s use of maladaptive strategies, whereas paternal depression was not. Moreover, maternal authoritative parenting styles and authoritarian control, seemed to decrease their children’s use of maladaptive strategies. On the other hand, the more parenting stress reported by the fathers, the more their children showed the use of maladaptive strategies.