The Effect Of Childhood Filial Responsibility On Rural Middle School Students’Mental Health: The Chain Mediating Effect

Filial Responsibility is defined as a series of instrumental and/or emotional caregiving behaviors in which a child provided for family members.As a way of interaction among family members of family micro-system,childhood filial responsibility may be a kind of traditional parenting or internalized filial responsibilities of family based on the particular cultural background,having a positive or negative impact on the individual’s mental health.Compared with the individualism culture,taking care of family members has customarily been more encouraged and recognized under collectivist culture.It is seen that constructive or destructive effects of childhood filial responsibility on individual’s mental health may be moderated by cultural values.In the context of collectivist culture,many previous studies on filial responsibility have been mostly focused on children from transnational immigrant families,but less study have been done on children from the original nationality.In particular,there are very few studies in rural areas of China where the cultural tradition of familism is relatively stable.Consequently,this study aims to explore chain mediating effect and it’s overtime stability of childhood filial responsibility on mental health for rural middle school students by revising Filial Responsibility Scale for Child and Adolescent applied to rural children in China.Rural junior high school students were surveyed using filial responsibility scale for child and adolescent,family adaptability cohesion scale,positive affect /negative affect scale,brief multidimensional students’ life satisfaction scale and short-term version of center for epidemiologic studies depression scale.Results are as follows:(1)The revised Filial Responsibility Scale for Child and Adolescent(FRS-CA)included 15 items,which were divided into three dimensions: instrumental caregiving,emotional caregiving and unfairness.The scale has good reliability as well as validity.(2)In general,as for rural junior high school students,the score of instrumental caregiving was significantly higher than the theoretical median.Emotional caregiving and perceived unfairness scores were significantly lower than the theoretical median.(3)There are two chain mediation effects of family cohesion and perceived social support between filial responsibility and subjective well-being or depression.The study found that family cohesion and perceived social support mediated the effect of filial responsibility on mental health.This study enriches filial responsibility under collectivism culture,and provides a new direction for similar studies both at home and abroad.