ORIGINAL PAPER Australian Parenting and Adolescent Boys’ and Girls’ Academic Performance and Mastery: The Mediating Effect of Perceptions of Parenting and Sense of School Membership Sivanes Phillipson 1 • Laura McFarland 2 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract This study contributes to the understanding of how parenting relates to adolescents’ academic outcomes. This study tested the hypothesis that parenting behaviours, including parental warmth, anger, consistency and self-ef- ficacy, are related to adolescents’ academic performance and mastery, and that this relationship is mediated by adolescent boys’ and girls’ perceptions of parenting and their sense of school membership in different ways. Multi- group nested structural equation models were built using the data obtained from Wave 5 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Four measures of parenting beha- viours, adolescents’ perception of parenting behaviour, adolescents’ sense of school membership and their aca- demic performance and mastery were obtained from 1926 boys and 1850 girls and their parents to test this study’s hypotheses. The path models showed that girls’ perceptions of parenting played a more explicit role in affecting their academic performance and mastery compared to boys. Furthermore, parenting behaviours were mediated by boys’ and girls’ sense of school membership, as influenced by their perceptions of parenting, in predicting their mastery and performance orientations, though the effects were quite different. The results suggest the roles played by parents in contributing to their children’s schooling and academic performance somewhat differ between boys and girls. Keywords Academic performance and mastery Á Adolescence perceptions Á Mediation Á Parenting behaviours Á School membership Introduction The role of parents in their children’s schooling has long been an interest to educational and developmental researchers (See and Gorard 2015). In relation to children’s sense of belonging at school and their academic motiva- tion, there are likely to be multiple influences, including peers, teachers and importantly, parents (Wentzel 1999). According to Darling and Steinberg’s (1993) contextual model of parenting, parents socialise their children by communicating goals they want their children to reach, values they want their children to internalize, and aspira- tions they want their children to achieve. Research con- firms that the goals, values and aspirations that parents hold are indeed related to their children’s academic goals, per- sistence in school, school-related accomplishments and university attendance (Spera 2005). In relation to parenting styles, a positive relationship exists between authoritative parenting, characterised by warmth, responsiveness and supportiveness, and children’s school-related outcomes (Brown and Iyengar 2008). Research has also established a link between positive parenting dimensions and adolescents’ sense of school belonging (Law et al. 2012) and academic and learning mastery goals (Gonzalez et al. 2002). Adolescents’ sense of school belonging has relations to a variety of adolescent outcomes (Blum and Libbey 2004) as does academic and & Laura McFarland lmcfarland@csu.edu.au Sivanes Phillipson Sivanes.phillipson@monash.edu 1 Faculty of Education Clayton Campus, Monash University, 29 Ancaro Imparo Way, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia 2 Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education, Charles Sturt University, PO Box 789, Albury, NSW 2640, Australia 123 J Child Fam Stud DOI 10.1007/s10826-016-0364-2