The Relationship Between Maternal Parenting Stress And Depression Of Junior High School Students: Maternal Parenting Style As A Mediator

Depression refers to individuals’ some negative reactions when they meet somedisturbing or unpleasant events in daily study and life. Nowadays, Depression hasdeveloped into a common psychological problem in junior high school. And theirlong term depression feelings have large potential danger to their current and futuredevelopment.In the junior middle school stage, adolescents have developed into a specialtransition period, and their parents often experience negative emotions such asintensity and anxiety in the process of nurturing their children. Compared with fathers,mother would experience more parenting stresses, for they are involved in children’daily life and would be more likely to pass some negative emotions to the childrendirectly, which would lead to children’s depressive emotion to some extent.Meanwhile, the more parenting stress mother has, the more likely they use harsh andother negative parenting style, which would in turn increase children’s depressionindirectly. However, previous researches about parenting stress mostly focus onspecial children’s parents and adolescents’ parents, few researches focused on normalones. Although there exist many researches which focus on the relationship betweenparental style and depression, but very few research discusses the relationship amongparenting stress, parental style and depression.The present study was to explore the relationship between parenting stress anddepression and whether the maternal parenting style mediated the relationshipbetween parenting stress and depression. A total of680participants finished theParental Bonding Instrument (PBI), Parenting Stress Index/Short Form (PSI/SF) andCenter for Epidemiology Studies Depression (CES D). The results showed that:(1)Junior High School students’ depression level shows significant differences in somedemography variables including gender, grade and sibling or not. Girls reportedhigher level depression than boys; students in grade3reported higher level depression than other two grades; and the individuals with sibling reported higher leveldepression than the only ones.(2) Mother reported different parenting stress in termof children’s gender and sibling or not. Compared with those who had only one child,mothers who had more than one child experienced more parenting stress, parent childinteraction disorder, and difficult children. Mothers who had a boy reported high levelof parent child interaction disorder and difficult children than those who had a girl.(3)There existed grade difference in maternal parenting style. Mother who had child ingrade1expressed more maternal caring than the other two. Mother with the onlychild would more likely care and encourage their children than those who had morethan one child.(4) There exist significant correction relation between depression,maternal parenting stress and maternal parenting style. The relationship betweenmaternal parenting stress and children’s depression was actually mediated by maternalparenting style. That is, mothers who had higher parenting stress may increase thedepression level of children through affecting their parenting style.