Academic anxiety, academic procrastination, and parental involvement in students and their parents

Headnote

Objectives. The study investigated the relationship between academic anxiety and procrastination in children and parents, and parents' direct involvement in their children's schoolwork.

Design. Children reported their current anxiety and procrastination and parents reported their anxiety and procrastination when they were children (a measure of indirect influence on their children's schoolwork habits), and on their current involvement in their children's schoolwork (a measure of direct influence).

Methods. Self-report measures were administered to 354 Israeli adolescents (ages 13,14, and 16) and their parents.

Results. Students were less anxious about homework than the other academic assignments. Older adolescents were less anxious about their schoolwork overall and procrastinated more than younger on homework. Parents of late adolescents were less involved in their children's schoolwork than parents of younger adolescents. Parents participated equally in school-related interactions that demanded high investment of time and effort, but mothers engaged more than fathers in low investment activities. These direct and indirect parental influences on their children's procrastination were of low magnitude overall, but appeared relatively stronger for mothers.

Conclusions. The more students were anxious about preparing for examinations and writing papers, the more they procrastinated on these assignments, confirming the appraisal-anxiety avoidance (AAA) model. The inverse relationship of anxiety and procrastination with regard to homework led to our making a post hoc distinction between task-centred and consequence-centred anxiety.

Studies have shown that people characterised by high anxiety procrastinate more frequently than people characterised by low (Burka & Yuen, 1983; Flett, Blankstein & Martin, 1995; Rothblum, Solomon & Murakami, 1986). This finding may be explained in terms of an appraisal-anxiety-avoidance (AAA) model of procrastination.

According to major cognitive theories of stress and coping (Hobfoll, 1989; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), if people perceive a situation to be threatening and their resources inadequate to cope with the threat, they react with stress reactions, including manifest anxiety, and try to escape from the situation. In the adaption of this model proposed here, people characterised by fear of failure or lack of ease about doing certain kinds of tasks become anxious when called upon to perform them and allay their anxiety by postponing them as much as possible. Task avoidance or procrastination becomes a powerful negative reinforcement precisely because it reduces anxiety, thereby perpetuating a task...