Analyzing Effects of Parenting Style on Child Development Using Machine Learning

Child development is the process of a child developing the foundation of their health, learning capabilities, and behavioral characteristics. Each individual undergoes this development as a child, and it’s essential to understand how parental parenting habits impact their child. Parents and children from primary to secondary schools were part of a study that answered questionnaires about parenting styles and their children’s habits and characteristics. We use different classification techniques, such as KNN, Random Forest, SVM, and AdaBoost to create a predictive model to assign different areas of child development with a ranking—from 1 (high) to 4 (low). Our results demonstrate that the best performance is obtained from Random Forest and a child’s development can be well predicted based on parenting habits.