OVERPARENTING IN EDUCATION REALITY: TEACHER EXPERIENCE

Most parents would agree that parenting is extremely complex and challenging. It is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social and intellectual development of a child from infancy throughout a person’s life. Children are not born successful or unsuccessful. It is up to the parents and their behaviours to become what they become later. Normative or healthy parenting is a precondition for a child’s success, self-confidence, and autonomy. Meanwhile, non-normative, unhealthy parenting or overparenting may have a harmful impact on a child’s social skills and overall life.

The research was aimed to gather teachers’ experiences about the existing parenting behaviours and to reveal the dominant parenting patterns that may be observed in nowadays child-raising practices. For this aim the research instrument was constructed designing of which was based on a specific focus on different areas of unhealthy, non-normative parenting. An international study was conducted that led to identification of the key aspects of the experience of teachers working with the overprotective parents and their children. 262 teachers from Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey, Romania and Lithuania participated in the survey.

The study findings served to reveal the dominant behaviours of overparenting observed by the teachers The findings also allowed to define the difficulties that teachers face in dealing with overparenting parents and overparented children.

The study was conducted in the framework of the international project “Overparenting – allow your children to make mistakes”, project No. 2020-1-PT01- KA204-078497.