Influence of Parenting Styles on Shyness among Adolescents

The current study intended to investigate the influence of parenting styles on shyness among adolescents.  A sample of 200 subjects whose age ranged between 11 to 14 years was considered as early adolescents in the present study. Thus, a total sample of 200 subjects (100 boys and 100 girls) from in and around Mysore city were randomly selected as the participants of the study. They were provided with Parental authority questionnaire (PAQ; Buri, 1991) to measure perceived parenting styles –permissive, authoritative and authoritarian, and Shyness Assessment Test (SAT; D’Souza,2006), which measured shyness in three domains-cognitive/affective, physiological and action oriented.  Two-way ANOVA was employed to find out the influence of parenting styles and gender, and school type on shyness. Results revealed that parenting styles had significant influence over physiological domain and total shyness scores, where adolescents with permissive parenting styles were shyer than adolescents with authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles. Female adolescents were shyer than male adolescents in all the domains of shyness including total shyness. Adolescents studying in government schools were shyer than adolescents studying in aided and unaided schools in action oriented domain of shyness and total shyness.