The Prospective Relationships among Maternal Behaviors, Maternal Education and Child Academic Achievement

This study aimed to investigate issues of consistency and change in maternal behaviors and children's outcomes over time, and, prospectively, the nature of the relationship between mothers and children's academic achievement. Both family status and family processes, i.e. maternal education, maternal depression, and maternal marital happiness were included in the study. This study investigated how these factors affected maternal behaviors, and how, in turn, these behaviors influence children's attributes, i.e., child’s academic orientation, self-esteem, social adjustment, and academic achievement. This study found gender differences in adolescents' self-esteem, academic orientation, and academic achievement. Girls on average had lower selfesteem than boys. Meanwhile, boys have lower levels of academic orientation and lower academic achievement (GPA) than girls in their adolescent years. The prospective findings indicated maternal nurturance behaviors influenced children's academic achievement through children's academic orientation. The prospective longitudinal findings in this study also found that children's self-esteem was not a mediating variable in the relationship between parental nurturance behaviors and the children's academic achievement in the mother-son dyads. However, a mediating effect on children's self-esteem was found in mother-daughter dyads.