Differences in sport-confidence among elite athletes with different perceived parenting styles

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the differences in sport-confidence among elite athletes who perceived their parents to have different parenting styles. Respondents for the investigation were 176 elite figure skaters and tennis players, 13-18 years old. Using the fourfold parenting framework (authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful) of Maccoby and Martin (1983) and Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, and Dornbusch (1991), athletes were placed into one of the four parenting groups based upon their ratings of their parents on two dimensions: support/involvement and control/strictness. The athletes were then compared on the dependent variable of sport-confidence.

A three-way analysis of variance indicated that athletes who had parents categorized as neglectful scored the lowest on sport confidence (F[3, 160]=4.95, p=.003). Results did not vary as a function of athletes' gender (F [3, 160]=1.87, p=.483) or sport (F[3, 160]=.823, p=.483 ). There was not an interaction between parenting style, gender, and sport on confidence (F[3, 160]=.470, p=.703). The general absence of interactions between perceived parenting style, gender, and sport suggest the influence of perceived parenting style in terms of confidence are consistent across sport and gender.

However, confidence did vary by gender (F[l, 160]=5.282, p=.023) and sport (F [1, 160]=6.824, p=.010). Male skaters were the most confident athletes and female tennis players the least confident. This study did not replicate earlier findings that authoritative parenting produces adolescents who are more confident about their abilities (Baumrind, 1991; Lamborn et al., 1991; Steinberg, 1990). This is the first such perceived parenting study using athletes. Therefore, a more heterogenous sample of athletes may be warranted to explore whether the patterns of socialization effects observed in this sample of national level tennis players and skaters hold true in other groups. This study lends further support for distinguishing between the two types of "permissive" parents: those that are indulgent and those that are neglectful.