The relatonship between the secondary school students'perceived parental attitides and self-esteem and learned helplessness

The people with whom children establish relationship is of great importance in the process of children?s development. With their attitudes and behaviors, parents are the most important role models and information sources of their children. Therefore, parents? attitudes, behaviors and methods they use are decisive points in formation of children?s personality, establishing positive social relationships and appear as healthy individuals in society. Parental attitudes affect children?s development of personality multi-dimensionally. Many personality traits are directly or indirectly related with family relationships and parental attitudes. This relationship emerges often in the litareture. In the studies researched, it is seen that there are important relationships with parental attitudes, children?s levels of self-esteem and learned helplessness. In general, it is concluded that self-esteem levels of the the children growing with democratic parental attitudes are high, and learned helplessness levels are low. Populationf of the study consists of all public and privates schools within the boundaries of the city of Istanbul. Six schools constitutes sample group of the study. The research was carried out in the second half of the 2012-2013 Acedemic year and reached more than 600 participants . At the research, significant relationships were found between perceived parental attitudes and the levels of self-esteem and learned helplessness of the students. Key Words: Parent Attitudes, self-esteem, learned helplessness, personality.