PARENTAL COMPETENCE AND ITS DEFICIENCY AMONG PARENTS OF TEENAGERS

Abstract

The article discusses the needs and demand for psychological and pedagogical counseling among parents of adolescents. Using a specially designed questionnaire, the relevance of inquiries from parents of teenagers on a sample of 11038 parents (parents of children in the age range from 11 to 15 years old) from different cities of Perm Krai and other regions of the Russian Federation was analyzed. The parental questionnaire consisted of 55 questions on various problem areas of parental competence: learning activities, difficulties in learning, stress, emotional state, problems in behavior and adaptation, questions of digital socialization, recreation, reading, writing and other topics. The questionnaire used a dichotomous scale and collected data on the child's age and place of residence. Parent requests were analyzed using hierarchical clustering. Hierarchical cluster analysis (binary distances, Ward's method) allowed us to combine parental requests into two large clusters. The first cluster covers issues of educational and professional competences, competences of interpersonal interaction, coping with stress, digital socialization, deviant behavior and overcoming difficulties in the teenager's learning. The second cluster covers the issues of external conditions of adolescent socialization and learning, its normative, legal and sociogenic aspects: organizational and legal competence of a parent, difficulties of an adolescent in communication with the society and problems of adaptation in a small group, as well as problems connected with teaching a gifted child. In addition, it was found that as an adolescent grows older, some counseling topics become less relevant to his or her parent (e.g., issues of independence, academic performance, communication and behavioral problems), which leads to a dynamic decrease in the demand for parental counseling (by the total number of selected relevant counseling topics) among parents of 11- to 15-year-olds.