Analysis of How My Parents Affect My Learning

Analysis of how my parents affect my learning

Not only shaping one’s character, parenting style can also influence one’s learning. In the essay, I will analyze how I was affected by authoritarian parenting in academic aspect when I was in primary school, and what classical conditioning appeared with the excessively high degree of punishment under Law of Effect.

As I grew up under Authoritarian parenting, my parents never tried to understand what problems I met. Instead, they gave me rules and apply corporal punishment if I failed to follow. Authoritarian parenting refers to the restrictive parenting style in which the parents make their children follow their directions with little or even no explanation (Baumrind,1967). It involves high parental demand, but low degree of parental responsiveness. To be a “good girl” of my parents, there were always standards to achieve. For academic performance, I had to get grade A in all subjects. Nevertheless, once I met any difficulties in studying and asked my parents for help, they never tried to understand. They would tell me to memorize the content by rote, and scolded me that I had not paid attention in class. If I failed to meet their expectation, they would apply punishment under Law of Effect, which is a principle stating that consequences of responses determine whether the tendency to perform is strengthened or weakened. If the consequence is aversive, the tendency of behavior will be lowered, vise versa (Richard,2004). Proper punishment would be a great way to bring a child up, but the excessively severe degree of physical punishment constructed my fear upon studying.

Under the strict parenting style, pain and fear was what I thought studying was, in which Principle of Classical Conditioning is applied. Classical Conditioning is the process of automatic learning that the conditioned stimulus evokes a response that was originally evoked by unconditioned stimulus (Richard, 2004). As my parents hope that I...