The Relationship Of Parenting Stress And Parental Involvement On 6-month Old Infant's Parents In Nanjing

Parenting stress is to perform the parental role and in the course of parent-child interaction, parents are influenced by their individual personal traits, parent-child interaction,characteristics of children and situational factors of family. Parental involvement means parents participate in the education of children development. Both of parenting stress and parental involvement are important influence factors of children development. The present paper investigates the differences of parenting stress and parental involvement of 6-month old infants's mothers and fathers, analyzes the related factors which influence parenting stress and parental involvement of parents, and studies the correlation between parenting stress and parental involvement.The present study recruits 420 couples and their infants born in Nanjing Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital from June, 2006 to March, 2007 as research subjects to investigate the general information, parenting stress and parental involvement of 6-month-old infant's parents by general information questionnaire of parents, parenting stress index-short form(PSI-SF) and questionnaire of parental involvement produced by ourselves.The results are as follows: 1. The parenting stress of 6-month-old infant's mothers (80.01±14.09)is higher than that of fathers(74.93±14.53)significantly(t=5.12,P<0.01).2. The differences of scores on mother's parenting stress with variety of educational level have statistical significance(P<0.05); The differences of scores on father's parenting stress with variety of educational level have no significance(P>0.05);No significant correlation is found between parenting stress of parents and the age of parents, gender of infants or family economic status. 3. Six-month-old infant's mother's parental involvement(27.46±7.94) is higher than father's(21.17±9.56) significantly (t=10.28,P<0.01).4. No significant correlation is found between parental involvement of parents and their educational level, age, family economic status and sex of infants(P>0.05). 5. The correlation between parenting stress of mothers and parental involvement of mothers is negative.(r=-0.11,P<0.05). There is no significant correlation between parenting stress of fathers and paternal involvement of fathers(P>0.05). No significant correlation is found between father's paternal involvement and parenting stress ( P>0.05).Based on above results, we find that the parenting stress of 6-month-old infant's mothers is significantly higher than that of fathers, and the educational level of mothers is one of the main factors influencing parenting stress of mothers. The more often mothers participate in parental involvement, the lower their parenting stress become; There is significant difference between parental involvement of mothers'and fathers', and has no association between father's parental involvement and parenting stress of mothers, the interaction between each other needs to be confirmed by follow up research.