The Relationship Between Parenting Styles And Anxiety Of Preschool Children

Anxiety is a set of emotions including frustrated self-esteem and self-confidence, feelings of defeat, nervousness, and fear which are resulted from one's expectations of not being able to reach the goal or not being able to overcome difficulties (Luo Bowei, 1997). Children often experience anxiety. Moderate anxiety is helpful for children to accomplish his task better or avoid danger effectively. However, being overanxious will influence children's bodily and mental health negatively and interfere with children's normal life and activity. Many factors can make children anxious. As to preschool children, they mainly have their activities in the family context; so family context is correlated with children's anxiety disorder. As an important family factor of young children, parenting style influences children's anxiety profoundly. Thus, it is significant for us to research the relationship between parenting styles and children's anxiety in order to enrich and perfect family system theory and family ecosystem theory, improve parents'rearing quality, diagnose and treat anxious children in time.In this study, mothers of 556 preschool children completed Parenting Styles Questionnaire that was designed by Professor Chen Fumei of Taiwan and Preschoolers'Anxiety Scale designed by Spence et al., and results show:1 In general, parenting style doesn't differ among children of different ages and genders. As to corporal punishment, however, mothers have more corporal punishment on low-grade boys than on low-grade girls; mothers' corporal punishment on middle and high graders doesn't have significant difference.2 In general, mothers'parenting styles doesn't have significant age variance on authoritarian and authoritative aspects, but main effect of age on the subfactors corporal punishment and warmth is significant. Mothers aged below 30 have more corporal punishment on children than mothers aged over 30 do; Mothers aged between 30 and 35 have more warmth on children than mothers aged below 30 and mothers aged over 35 do.