Researchers from the University Of Pittsburgh in the US studied 1,482 students for the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS), following them for nine years, according to star2.com.
Participants reported on their parents’ use of physical and verbal aggression, as well as their own interactions with peers and delinquency.
At age 21, three years after their expected high school graduation, they reported on their highest level of educational attainment.
“In our study, harsh parenting was related to lower educational attainment through a set of complex cascading processes that emphasized present-oriented behaviors at the cost of future-oriented educational goals,” said study leader Rochelle Hentges, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Pittsburgh’s psychology department.
Harsh parenting was defined as yelling, hitting and using verbal or physical threats as a means of punishment.
The researchers found that adolescents who were harshly parented were more likely to say their peer group was more important than other responsibilities, meaning they often spent time with friends instead of doing homework and broke parental rules to keep friends.
This, the researchers reported in the US scientific journal Child Development, led to riskier behaviors by the girls and greater delinquency by the boys.
These behaviors, in turn, led to lower educational achievement, reflected by higher drop-out rates in high school or college