The Research Of Maternal Personality Affecting Parenting Style

Parenting style mainly refers to a fixed cross-situational process as the centre of parent-child relationship in family and directly acts on the parent-child interaction process. This process has a cross-situational stability of the concrete expression of parental upbringing and education of their children in daily life and also refers to effective collection in the process which parents'attitudes and behaviors pass to their children. Mothers, as the children's first teachers and the main educators in family education, pass to their children social values, behavior, systems of attitude and social ethics through their own words and deeds. It has been universally recognized that parenting styles can be affected by many factors, but the underlying factors that affect the parenting styles are not enough. Therefore, the study is to explore the relationship between mother's personality and parenting styles. The completion of the study can enrich the theory of preschool education and psychological development, and, in practice, can also provide some reference to child's education in family.This study combines questionnaire and observation. Questionnaire is used in measuring maternal personality. 1 to 3-year-old children's mothers who are twice taken at random from Shenyang are 540 and 400 respectively. The collectably valid questionnaires are 494 and 382 respectively, which are used in revising personality questionnaire. Observation is used in measuring maternal parenting style. 32 1.5-year-old children's mothers who are taken at random from Shenyang city are engaged in the experiment of parenting style. Mothers of participants of the experiment are requested to fill out the revised personality questionnaires. Finally, the relationship between maternal personality and parenting style will be treated with correlative and regressive analysis.The result of this study shows that: 1. Revised maternal personality questionnaire has high reliability and validity, which can serve as a tool to measure maternal personality. 2. Maternal neuroticism is significantly negatively related to the total score of parenting style and the shared affective ambience. Maternal high neuroticism is associated with the low level of parenting style and the shared affective ambience, while maternal low neuroticism is associated with the high level of parenting style and the shared affective ambience. The result of further regressive analysis shows that maternal neuroticism affects the level of one dimension (the shared affective ambience) of parenting style. 3. Maternal empathy concern is significantly positively related to the total score of parenting style and the shared affective ambience. Maternal empathy concern is associated with the high level of the total score of parenting style and the shared affective ambience; maternal low empathy concern is associated with the low level of the total score of parenting style and the shared affective ambience. The result of further regressive analysis shows that there is no causal relationship between them. 4. Maternal openness to experience is significantly positively related to the shared affective ambience, and maternal openness to experience affects the shared affective ambience. 5. Maternal conscientiousness and perspective taking is significantly positively related to responsiveness. Maternal high conscientiousness and perspective taking is associated with the more responsiveness; maternal low conscientiousness and perspective taking is associated with the less responsiveness. The result of further regressive analysis shows that maternal perspective taking affects their responsiveness, but there is no causal relationship between maternal conscientiousness and their responsiveness. 6. Maternal responsiveness is significantly negatively related to the negative signal of child directing. 7. There are significant differences of the different level of education for maternal neuroticism, agreeableness and perspective taking. 8. There are mo significant differences of the different type of occupation for five dimensions of maternal personality.