The Relationship Among Parental Expectation, Academic Self-Concept And Adolescents' Internalizing Problems

Internalizing problems is the most common mental health problem among adolescents, indicating essentially individual internal psychological problems, mainly for anxiety and depression. Adolescents are in a transitory stage from childhood to adulthood. They grow fast physically while slow psychologically. In face of the physical and psychological development imbalances, adaptation difficulty followed along with psychological conflict may appear and then trigger internalizing problems occurrence. The increasingly growing of internalizing problems has a poor prognosis for adolescents' current and subsequent healthy development and social adaptation. It is a hot topic in the field of developmental psychology that the occurrence and development characteristics of individual internalizing problems, as well as the influencing factor of adolescents' internalizing problems.Self-concept was viewed as an important influencing factor of adolescents' internalizing problems in previous researches and was divided into non-academic self-concept and academic self-concept. Parents were considered as important others who played significant role on adolescents' developmental outcome directly and indirectly. For example, parental expectation could change/influence the way adolescents evaluate themselves and then their emotional health. Parental expectation as an considerable part of the family factors, its mechanism action for adolescents' internalizing problems is to be further discussed. As such, the Self-Description Questionnaire II(SDQ- II) and Youth Self Report(YSR) were administered on 582 adolescents and the Parental Expectation Questionnaire(PEQ)on their parents to explore the characteristic of adolescents' internalizing problems, parental expectations and academic self-concept and their relationships, and find out whether academic self-concept could mediate the relationship between parental expectations and adolescents' internalizing problems.Conclusions drawn in this study were as follows:(1) Adolescents from senior high school reported the highest level of internalizing problems, and primary school students reported the lowest level of internalizing problems. Generally internalizing problems of girls were significantly higher than that of boys; Parental expectation for primary students was reported higher level than that for junior and senior high school. Parental expectation for future development and interpersonal relationship from primary school was reported higher level than that from junior and senior high school; Adolescents from primary school reported higher level of math, verbal and generic self-concept than ones from junior and senior high school. Boys reported higher level of mathematics self-concept but lower of verbal self-concept than girls. Only children reported higher level of generic self-concept than those with siblings.(2) Adolescents' internalizing problem was correlated negatively with parental expectation and academic self-concept, respectively, and parental expectation had positive correlation with academic self-concept.(3) Academic self-concept played partially a mediating role between parental expectation and internalizing problems.