The Impact Of Maternal Educational Level On Maternal Socialization Goals In Different Conditions

The current study aimed to explore the within-nation differences on maternal socialization in China. Through reviewing the past research and interviewing with22mothers of grade3to6elementary school student, there was a hypothesis that maternal educational level would influent maternal socialization significantly, and mothers would change socialization strategies when facing on children’s different negative emotions and type of situations. Through prior research of interviewing mothers, two kinds of negative emotions were chosen, including anger and sadness, and two types of situations were chosen including interpersonal problem and academic problem, thus totally four hypothetic situations were set up for research on maternal emotional response and behavioral response.204mothers and their children were recruited for this study from northeastern China, and they were tested by maternal socialization goal questionnaire, maternal emotional response to children’s negative emotion questionnaire and maternal behavioral response to children’s negative emotion questionnaire.There were five studies in this paper. Results showed that mothers with advanced educational level scored higher on autonomous goals, positive emotion and supportive behaviors comparing with mothers with basic educational level, but mothers with basic educational level scored higher on interpersonal socialization goal, negative emotion and unsupportive behaviors. Results also showed that children’s sadness would be more likely accepted than children’s anger by Chinese mothers, in other words, mothers showed more negative emotions and unsupportive behaviors to children’s anger than children’s sadness. Additionally, mothers showed different emotional responses and behavioral responses when reacting to academic problem and interpersonal problem, such that children’s sadness on academic problem would be less likely accepted and children’s anger on interpersonal problem would be less likely accepted. Moreover, mothers adopted problem-solved behavior most and training secondly, but encourage of children’s negative emotions the least.The current study not only test the previous results from other research, but give more details on children’s problem such as anger versus sadness and academic problem versus interpersonal problem, and provide benefits to research on maternal socialization when facing different negative emotions and different types of situations. More importantly, the questionnaires revised in this study can be used in the further research on maternal socialization, and set a light on further research direction.