The purpose of this study was to examine group differences in paternal behaviors (i.e., paternal connection, paternal punitiveness, and paternal knowledge) within and across three academic achievement levels-low, moderate, and high, and to explore the effects of paternal behaviors on the academic motivation of Chinese adolescents within these three achievement groups. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) indicated that adolescents with low achievement perceived their fathers as more punitive than teens with moderate and high academic achievement. Regression analyses also revealed that paternal punitiveness (negative) and paternal knowledge (positive) were significant predictors of academic motivation for teens with low levels of academic achievement; while paternal punitiveness was a significant negative predictor of academic motivation among adolescents with moderate achievement. In contrast, for adolescents with high achievement, paternal connection was a positive significant predictor of academic motivation. The present findings provide some evidence that the impact of parental behaviors on teen's motivation varies across adolescent academic achievement levels, which may prove useful for professionals working with fathers to help target the most effective parenting behaviors to foster academic motivation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.