The Role of Father's Parenting Styles on Their Children's General Health Hadi Bahrami Ehsan 1+ , Said Pournaghash-Tehrani 1 1 Psychology Department, University of Tehran Tehran, Iran Key Words: Parenting Style; General Health, Father’s Education 1. Introduction Examining the effects of parental rearing styles has been done from many different aspects; e.g., studying the relationship between parental rearing style and patterns of attachment [1]; the quality of adult relationship with adolescent and its role in the development of behavioral problems, and the evaluation of the role of personality factors in this regard [2]. Most of the studies performed in this area have looked at some important features of parent-child relationship including warmth, care and involvement in order to evaluate psychosocial consequences of such relationship. The general characteristics of parent – child behavior are defined by some researchers in three different aspects including: • Warmth: Parental behavior including affection more than ignoring and punishment. • Monitoring: Parents bearing this behavioral aspect surprise their children very closely and set out stringent codes of behavior for their children to abide by; but do not necessarily punish them if they fail to do so [3]. • Involvement: Parents with this behavioral aspect are only able to explain their children's behaviors and attitude and from the viewpoint of attitude they are child – oriented; i.e., they abide by the rules of their children [4]. Three types of parent's behavioral pattern; Authoritative, Authoritarian and permissive have been offered regarding the warmth and control aspect of behavior [5]. In terms of child rearing, authoritative parents employ high control and warmth, authoritarian parents employ high control and low warmth and permissive patterns employ low control and high warmth, towards raising their children [6]. Children of authoritative parents, compared to those of authoritarian's, are more independent and have higher self-esteem. Also, they lame higher sense of responsibility and are more flexible when encountering educational and mental problems. The children of authoritarian parents are unable to perform alone. They have a very low self- esteem, lack of sense of curiosity and are inflexible in terms of academic and mental problems [7]. + Corresponding author. E-mail address: hbahrami@ut.ac.ir. 259 2012 2nd International Conference on Social Science and Humanity IPEDR vol.31 (2012) © (2012) IACSIT Press, Singapore Abstract. Aim:To determine the relationship between parenting style and general health, this study performed. Methods: 400 middle school students (200 boys and 200 girls) who were randomly selected were administered the Goldberg's 28-item questionnaire of general health. Also, the fathers of all participants responded to Baumrind's measure of parenting style questionnaire. The style of rearing included permissive, authoritarian and authoritative. General health was considered to be the subjects' level of adjustment and lack of psychopathological symptoms. The predictor or independent variable was the parent's child-rearing style and the dependent variable (criterion) was the subject's general health. Results: Our results showed that general health of students whose parents had authoritative rearing style was better than that of students whose parents had authoritarian and permissive rearing style. Conclusion: father's increased knowledge leads to their increased awareness regarding their rearing styles which, in turn, leads to adapting more suitable rearing styles.