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ABSTRACT
Parental enabling attitudes and behavior interfere with the child's ability to take responsibility for his or her behavior. Enabling is expressed in overprotectiveness and manipulation in which parents insulate their children from unpleasant circumstances and from making mistakes. Unfortunately, these are the very situations in which most children learn self-control, independence, and strategies to correct aberrant behavior. Children of enabling parents often fail to learn that their actions have consequences. The Lynch Enabling Survey for Parents (LESP), a forty-item questionnaire designed to assess the enabling behavior of parents, was evaluated to establish its psychometric properties. In Experiment 1, 416 parents responded to the LESP. The instrument was determined to be reliable (rs = .84 and .92 for split-half and test-retest reliability, respectively) and valid. Factor analysis established four factors, assessing Direct Enabling Parent Involvement, Indirect Nonenabling Parent Involvement, Direct Nonenabling Parent Involvement, and Indirect Enabling Parent Involvement. In Experiment 2, the LESP and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale were used to assess the differences between ninth-grade at-- risk and honors students and their parents. The responses of parents of at-- risk students on the LESP were significantly more enabling than were the responses of the parents of honors students. At-risk and honors students were also significantly different in their locus of control. Lastly, there was a significant relationship between parents! LESP scores and their children's locus of control scores.
Concerns about at-risk youth and the national dropout rate have existed for decades. Parents, teachers, and researchers have sought greater understanding of the causes of academic underachievement in hopes of identifying an effective course of prevention. One fruitful area of research has been locus of control (Rotter, 1966, 1973), which has been found to be a significantly better predictor of grades than standardized achievement test scores (Stipek & Weisz, 1981).
The advantages of an internal locus of control have been well established (Lefcourt, 1982; Oswald, Walker, Krajewski, & Reilly, 1994; Parrott & Strongman, 1984; Rawson, 1992; Weisz, 1986). Considerable research has demonstrated that gifted children are more likely to have an internal locus of control (Harty, Adkins, & Hungate, 1984; Karnes & Mho, 1991; Yong, 1994). This is likely due to the finding that children with an internal locus of control have...