A survey of mothers' relationships with their preschoolers

Abstract

A survey of mother‐child relationships was conducted in a socially deprived, industrial area of Melbourne, Australia. The paper explores the relationships between child, temperament and behaviour, mother's causal attributions from mother‐child interaction outcomes, their perceived stress and self‐concept as educators of their child. The study included 103 subjects, recruited through community‐based maternal and child health centres. Analysis revealed that mother's low self‐concept as educators of the child was predictive of maternal stress. Also, mothers' ratings of child temperament as difficult or easy affected relationships between mothers' attributions of responsibility for mother‐child interaction outcomes and perceived stress. The implications of these findings are relevant to occupational therapy's role in facilitating healthy relationships between mother and child.

A comparison of mothers' and fathers' experience of parenting stress and attributions for parent–child interaction outcomes

“…They underscore the importance of addressing the needs of the parents as well as their children. Parenting young children is a challenging and often stressful experience for parents, even when the children have no identified developmental problems (Esdaile and Greenwood, 1995a). Therefore, programmes aimed at prevention can be an important investment in the future well-being of families.…”

“…A temperament measure was not used, as the child domain subset of the PSI was constructed to examine child temperament factors (Abidin, 1990;Chess and Thomas, 1986). Moreover, the temperament factors Adaptability, Distractibility, and Hyperactivity (or Activity Intensity) had been found to correlate significantly with temperament factors on the Easy/Difficult Scale of the Australian Temperament Project's Short Temperament Scale for Toddlers (Esdaile and Greenwood, 1995a;Prior et al, 1989). 3.…”

“…Comparisons were made between data from mothers and fathers in this study as well as with previously collected data on 202 mothers (Esdaile and Greenwood, 1995a;1995b) and 23 fathers of children who were not disabled. In order to examine the presence of main effects for disability of child, gender of parent and interactions between gender of parent and presence of child with a disability, each of the domain score variables was subjected to a separate two factor, completely randomized design ANOVA comparing responses of mothers and fathers and parents of children with and without disabilities.…”

“…The first study demonstrated that differing child temperament variables and mothers' attributions of responsibility to themselves, or to their child for negative parent-child interaction outcomes can minimize or exacerbate mothers' perceptions of parenting stress (Esdaile and Greenwood, 1995a). Mothers, who perceived their children as having a difficult temperament, were less stressed, and mothers who perceived their children as having an easy temperament, were more stressed if they attributed responsibility to their child for negative mother-child interaction outcomes.…”

“…These studies (Esdaile and Greenwood, 1995a;1995b) had focused on mothers of preschool children aged 2-3.5 years, as this is a developmentally demanding period (Chess and Thomas, 1986) and mothers are still most frequently the primary caregivers of children in this age group (Larson, 2000). As previously stated, mothers of children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to parenting stress which may place them at physical and psychological risk (Bristol et al, 1993;Wanamaker and Glenwick, 1998;Weiss, 1991).…”