As adolescents progress from elementary to secondary school, their academic success increasingly depends on their ability to manage their own time and behavior. Because the family plays such an important role in the development of responsible autonomy, this study examined authoritative parenting and the hypothesis that authoritative parents promote school success. Subjects were 157 working- and middle-class families with a first-born child between the ages of 11 and 16 who was enrolled in the public schools. Families completed a measure of the extent and degree of the adolescent's involvement in 10 different household responsibilities; a checklist concerning 17 areas of decision-making on a variety of day-to-day issues used to assess the nature of the family's decision-making style; and adolescents' characterizations of their parents' warmth and use of psychological control. Schools provided information on the adolescents' grades, attendance, and standardized achievement test scores. The results revealed that the adolescents obtained higher grades and attended school more often when their parents used democratic, rather than authoritarian, decision-making practices; when their parents were warm; and when their parents were not overly controlling psychologically. Adolescents from authoritative households (as opposed to either authoritarian or permissive households) performed better in school than their peers, even after controlling for social class and achievement test scores. School grades and attendance records examined one year after the study suggest that authoritative parenting actually promotes school success among high school students. (NB)