Proceedings of The International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education
Year: 2019
DOI:
Parental Effectiveness and School Counselling in Elementary Education
Demetriou Loukia and Kalouri Ourania
ABSTRACT:
Parenting today is as challenging as ever. People grow into their parental role, and develop their parenting skills as they counter challenges and apply daily routines in response to their children’s needs. Parental effectiveness is significant in the behavior that parents show during the interactions with their children as well as during the entire socialization process. Parents of young children are responsible for their care, their physical safety and for their physical, cognitive and emotional development; they micromanage the child’s inclusion in society and cultivate his/her socially acceptable behaviors. If they feel that they are efficient at their role as parents, then the child’s cognitive and psychosocial development is enhanced. Counselling at the primary school level could enable parents to better manage problematic situations that arise with their child’s learning and/or emotional needs by providing in-school parental education sessions which would facilitate parents to improve their parental skills. This study aims to (a) investigate and measure parental effectiveness and (b) research the perception of parents of primary school children regarding the necessity to implement school Counselling in the Cyprus Elementary School System. A sample of 120 parents of children 6-12 years old, in Limassol, Cyprus, answered two questionnaires, namely the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) and a questionnaire we constructed to examine parental attitudes on Elementary School Counselling. Results show that parental effectiveness is significantly influenced by the educational background of the parents, the mother’s age, the status of the family, the number of children in the family and the gender of the child. At the same time, our results indicate that the majority of the participating parents acknowledge the importance of early Counselling interventions in parental educational programs at the primary education level.
Keywords: Parental Effectiveness, Parenting Skills, Primary Education, Positive Parenting, School Counselling.