Relationship Between Parenting Style And Shyness Of Child: The Moderating Effect Of Individualism-collectivism Tendency

With the increase of social competition, individuals need to more explicitly express themselves, so asto gain the recognition of others. As a result, parents become increasingly concerned about the shyness oftheir children. At the same time, parenting factor, as a sub-system that influence children development, caninfluence the shyness of children. So far, researches on the relationship between parenting style and shynessof children were carried out mainly in western culture. In view of the fact that parenting style and shynessshows the feature of culture-based and diversity, the present study intend to investigate the relationship andmechanism between parenting style and children shyness in the Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the study alsoplans to explore the differences of the relationship between parenting style and child shyness in differentparent samples that with different individualism-collectivism tendency.Currently, the scale researchers applied for the measure of child shyness was designed by XuChunrong, which includes three dimensions including cognition, emotion and behavior. This division isambiguous, thus it can not reflect the features of child shyness. In study one, the researcher selected 647students in Grade 4 and Grade 5, who come from city and village primary schools of Dezhou, Shandongprovince. The researcher developed a Child Shyness Scale which includes 22 items. It includes three factorsincluding fear of refuse, social withdrawal, and self-restriction of performance. The reliability and validityof the scale was verified. The results showed that it has good content validity and structure validity. It alsoshows good internal consistency reliability in scale and sub-scales. In study two, the researcher selected 673students in Grade 4 and Grade 5, who come from city and village primary schools of Dezhou, Shandongprovince. So as to investigate the relationship between parenting style and child shyness and the moderatingeffect of tendency of individualism-collectivism, the researcher applied Child Shyness Scale whichdeveloped by the researcher, parenting style scale and individualism-collectivism scale. The results are asfollowing.1. In the dimension of fear of refuse, the non-only-child children is higher that only-child children. Inthe dimension of social withdrawal, girls are higher than boys and children from villages show higher levelof social withdrawal than children from cities. For city children, girls showed higher level of socialwithdrawal than boys whereas there is no significant different in social withdrawal among village girls andboys. In the dimension of self-restriction of performance, the non only-child children is higher thatonly-child children. For boys from city, non-only-child boys shows higher level of self-restriction ofperformance than only-child boys. The self-restriction of performance of girls showed no significantdifference in whether they are only-child girls. For children from villages, there is no significant differentdifference between non-only-child children and only-child children.2.The mental autonomy could significantly negatively predict the three factor of child shyness.Individualism-collectivism tendency moderated the relationship between mental autonomy and fear of refuse. Mental autonomy could significantly predict the level of fear of refuse in both collectivism groupand individualism group, but it has more powerful predicting ability to individualism group. Meanwhile,Individualism-collectivism tendency moderated the relationship between mental autonomy and socialwithdrawal. Mental autonomy can predict social withdrawal level of child in the collective group whereas itshowed no such effect in individualism group.