Investigating the Relation between Life Skills and Parents 'Psychological Control with Children's Academic Anxiety

Anxiety is a general, vague emotion of anxiety that is accompanied by one or more physical feelings and, if persistent, other psychological problems. Anxiety is a reaction to survival that tells us what to avoid and how to avoid it. Academic anxiety is also a set of emerging physiological and behavioral cognitive responses that are associated with concerns about negative social consequences by failing an exam with a similar assessment status. Fear of getting poor grades and family blame, ridicule from peers, fear of not being able to continue education and especially going to university always involve students, especially high school students, and for this reason progress anxiety has become more colorful. Researchers have suggested ways to reduce academic anxiety, including the role of life skills. Life skills are defined as abilities, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors that are learned for great happiness and success to enable one to adapt to and master life successes. The results of researchers' studies also showed that another factor that can play a role in children's academic anxiety is the psychological control of parents. Psychological control includes certain states of the parenting dimension and the destructive type of parenting practices that parents use to bring their children into line with their expectations. Since parents usually provide the conditions for the family environment, it is important to know how parental or parenting characteristics play a role in causing anxiety. Anxiety in adolescents can be influenced by various factors, including several factors such as genetics, brain maturation process, hormonal changes, mood, and negative life experiences. But the role of parental behavior and control and metacognitive beliefs are also prominent in adolescent anxiety. Hence, this study seeks to answer the question of whether there is a relationship between life skills and psychological control of parents with children's academic anxiety?

The present study is applied in terms of purpose and correlational in terms of descriptive method. The statistical population of the study consisted of all married students with adolescent children in the field of psychology who were studying at the Islamic Azad University of Sari in the academic year 1399-400 and the number of 180 people according to the inquiry of the Islamic Azad University of Sari announced. The sample size was 123 people were selected through the stratified random sampling method through Krejcie Morgan table. In this study, three standard questionnaires were used, which are as follows. The Test Anxiety Inventory was developed by Sarason in 1957 and has 37 items. The short form of the Life Skills Questionnaire, developed by the World Health Organization in 1994, includes 20 questions and three subscales (decision making, problem-solving, and creative thinking). The Psychological Control Questionnaire was developed by Sunens et al. (2010) and measures the level of psychological control of parents. Pearson correlation coefficient test was used to analyze the data using SPSS software version 22.

The results showed that the psychological control of parents among the students had a mean of 55.58 and a standard deviation of 4.43. Life skills had an average of 69.01 and a standard deviation of 5.18 and children's academic anxiety had an average of 9.52 and a standard deviation of 1.36. Also, there is a negative and significant relationship between psychological control subscales and parents' life skills with children's academic anxiety (p=0.001).

Anxiety in early adolescence can lead to incompatibility in interpersonal relationships. Social functioning is one of the most important aspects of adolescence, and anxiety during this period may hurt social interactions, for example, reducing peer acceptance, lack, and quality of friendly communication. Anxious teens experience more psychological problems than their peers, disrupting their normal routine and daily functioning. Parents' possession of social skills creates a positive attitude towards education and school in students; Because parents who encourage and educate their children raise responsible students who act according to their creativity and desire to carry out educational activities. The limitations of this study should be stated that since the study was performed on all married students with adolescent children, care should be taken in generalizing the results to other samples. Due to the low research background, it is suggested that researchers in future research investigate the relationship between research variables in other samples. Also, descriptive research is of correlation type. It is suggested to use other research methods such as qualitative and experimental methods.