A Study On Parental Self-efficacy And Its Influential Factors Among Parents Of Pre-school Children

Parental self-efficacy may be defined as parents' self-referent estimations of competence in the parental role and as parents' perceptions of their ability to keep children's physical health, to improve the cognitive, emotional and social development of their children. According to literature reviews on parental self-efficacy and interviews among parents of pre-school children, the author designed the questionnaire. The questionnaire was carried out among eight hundred of parents at twelve kindergartens in Chongqing City, Shandong Province and Sichuan Province. By using the methods of questionnaire and the interviews, this study explores the developmental characteristics of parental self-efficacy and its influential factors. The results are the following:1. The self-made questionnaire is of good reliability and fair validity. It can be used as a credible and effective tool for measuring parental self-efficacy among parents of pre-school children.2. General characteristics: the level of parental self-efficacy is not high; the means of all the 5 factors are at middle level. By descending order, they are: health keeping, sociality supporting, emotion training, parenting ability, cognition promoting.3. Gender has significant effect on parental self-efficacy. Maternal self-efficacy is significantly higher than that of paternal self-efficacy.4. Age has no significant effect on parental self-efficacy. It in general submits "N" model. Efficacy level reaches maximum point in the second age section, and it drops to minimum point in the first and fourth age sections. But age has significant effect on perceived sociality supporting, Efficacy level of the second age section is much higher than that of others.5. Parental self-efficacy is higher in parents who live in cities than those who live in the countryside, the difference is not significant .But region has significant effect on perceived cognition promoting efficacy, emotion training efficacy and sociality supporting efficacy.6. Parental educational background has significant effect on parental self-efficacy. The higher the diploma is, the higher the level of parental self-efficacy. 7. Occupation has significant effect on parental self-efficacy. Parental self-efficacy is significant higher in parents who work as teachers and officials than others.8. There are ten factors which can predict the parental self-efficacy. They are parental emotion, relationships between neighbors, communication with teachers, parental health, parental gender, parenting experience, the development of children, parental occupation, supporting of friends. And the utmost Influential factor is parental emotion.9. The direct factors affecting parental self-efficacy are parental factors and social factors, and the former is more important influential factor. Besides, children's factors and family factors have indirect influence on parental self-efficacy.