The Role of Maternal Psychological Well-being and Child Difficult Behaviors in Chinese American Mothers? Parenting Attributions and Practices

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Date

2023-01-01

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thesis
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application:pdf

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Psychology

Program

Psychology

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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
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Subjects

Chinese American families
parent attributions
parenting
psychological well-being

Abstract

This study assessed whether: (a) the link between mothers? attributions and parenting practices was mediated by mothers? psychological well-being; and (b) the relation between mothers? attributions and psychological well-being was moderated by their children?s difficult behaviors. Chinese American mothers (N = 270; Mage = 37.8 years old, SDage = 4.5 years) of young children (Mage = 4.6 years old, SDage = 1.1 years) reported on their causal attributions for daily caregiving failures, psychological well-being, warm parenting, and psychologically controlling parenting. Their children?s teachers reported on children?s difficult behaviors. Results revealed that mothers? attributions of their caregiving failures to uncontrollable causes (e.g., poor parenting skills, high task difficulty) were associated with their poorer psychological well-being, which in turn was related to lower levels of warm parenting and greater use of psychological control. Further, this mediation was only significant when children displayed low and moderate levels of difficult behaviors.