The Relationships Between 3-to-5-year-old Child Activity And Parenting Style

Temperament is the foundation of personality development, which exerts an important and fundamental influence on human socialization. Among many factors that affect child temperament, parenting style is one of the most important. Studying the relationship between child temperament and parenting style will help parents and child educators apply reasonable educational methods and thus avoid the occurrence of mental and behavioral disorder. Activity is a part of child temperament and included as one dimension in several famous child temperament theories. Presently there are few researches about child activity in China. Therefore, the purpose of the present research is to study the relationship between child temperament and parenting style from the point of view of child activity. The first aim is to investigate the characteristics of 3-to-5-year-old child activity and then to study the relationship between child activity and parenting style. The concrete research method is that we develop the parent-evaluating child temperament questionnaire, meanwhile using the teacher-evaluating child temperament to investigate the sex difference, developmental tendency of activity and the differences between teacher view and parent view; and then we randomly select 61 3-to-5-year-old children and observe their characteristics of activity in the laboratory. The result comes that first, there is sex difference between 3 -to-5-year-old children and no difference exists in 3-to-5-year-old child activity; second, there is interaction between child activity and parenting style, for the more parents are permissive and doting, the higer their children's activity; parents treat different sex of children of different activity levels differently; parenting style of high level child activity is contradictive.