The Impact of Autocratic Parenting on Adolescents' Frustration Tolerance

The key function of a child's family is to raise the young person in as healthy a manner as possible (e.g., see Bornstein, 1995). The parents' role is to provide the child with a safe, secure, nurturing, loving, and supportive environment, one that allows the offspring to have a happy and healthy youth; this sort of experience allows the youth to develop the knowledge, values, attitudes, and behaviours necessary to become an adult making a productive contribution to self, family, community, and society (Lerner, et al., 1995).Authoritarian/ Autocratic Parenting is a style which believes in giving orders and giving punishment. It is highly demanding but is not responsive. Although authoritarian parents generally have good intentions, and want to teach their children to grow up to be good people they attempt to do so by using tools such as harsh punishment and shame.. What a parent does to fulfil these "duties" of his or her role is termed parenting; in other words, parenting is a term that summarizes behaviours used by a person--usually, but, of course, not exclusively, the mother or father-to raise a child. For both adolescents and their parents, adolescence is a time of excitement and of anxiety, of happiness and of troubles, of discovery and of bewilderment and of breaks with the past and yet of links with the future. The present research aims to study the impact of autocratic parenting on adolescents' frustration tolerance. The sample size was 60 school going teenagers 30 boys and 30 girls. It was hypothesized that there would be a significant relationship between autocratic parenting and aggression. Also it was hypothesized that rejection, neglect and utopian expectation and aggression of boys and girls were expected to be significantly correlated. The study reported significant relationship between autocratic parenting and aggression of boys and girls. The effect of autocratic parenting on the aggression (frustration tolerance) was seen significant in boys and girls. Also the relation of rejection, neglect, Utopian expectation and aggression was seen significant in both boys and girls. The study provides an opportunity for further research across age and other variables that could be related with it and to uncover the possible differences or similarities that may be present. Also it adds to the already existing data pool.