Caring or Controling? Parental Monitoring and its Effect on Negative Emotion and Achievement Motivation of At-risk Adolescents

Abstract Parental monitoring is essential in maintaining healthy parent-child relationship as expectation of parents could induce stress on children's emotion but at the same time might motivate them to strive for excellence. This research attempts to identify the effects of parental monitoring on negative emotion and achievement motivation of at-risk adolescents. Quantitative design was used to survey the second generation of residents whom their parents had joined the government resettlement programme, namely People Housing Project (PHP) in the 1980s. PHP provided low cost flats at the edge of metropolitan Kuala Lumpur and overall the residents were from a low socioeconomic status. There were 84 adolescents between the ages of 13 to 18 were recruited using purposive sampling method. The Pearson correlation test showed that parental monitoring was correlated significantly with the levels of negative emotions and achievement motivation of adolescents. The results of both t-tests showed that the levels of parental monitoring made significant effects on negative emotions and achievement motivation among the adolescents. The multiple regression result also showed that these at-risk adolescents who were monitored by their parents were more motivated to achieve than were pressured and had negative emotion. Thus, in times of caring for their children, parents should also be sensitive towards the changes of emotional state of their adolescent children, especially when those children are challenged in striving for excellence. It is suggested that a longitudinal study could focus on the coping method of at-risk adolescents in facing the challenges in adulthood.