The Maternal Rejection And Children’s Anxiety:Bidirectional Relationships And Moderating Factors

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health problem of children and adolescents, studies on the impact of family factors on children’s anxiety pointed out that the parental rejection is closely related to children’s anxiety. Parental rejection is mainly refers to the behaviors that parents lack of reaction or deny to their children. Previous studies have found that parental rejection has high incidence in various countries, but all most of these studies were carried out under the background of western culture. So one of the purposes of the present study is to explore the basic characteristics of parental rejection under the background of Chinese culture. Parental rejection would cause the anxiety of children, this point that parents influence children’s development was accepted by most researchers. But researchers also found that children’s behavioral problems can also affect the parenting behaviors. According to Bell’s "two-way model theory", children showed obvious talent differences since their birth, these differences would affect the behavior that parents treat to their children. Therefore, we must take “two-way interaction theory” into account when we considering the relationships between parental rejection and children’s anxiety. However, the most of previous studies examined the parents-driven effects, only a few of studies examined the child-driven effects. Then, we not sure that the relationship between the parental rejection and children’s anxiety is parents-driven effects or child-driven effects or there are two-way interactions. So another purposes of the present study is to explore the relationships between parental rejection and children’s anxiety based on longitudinal study. Besides, there are few studies explored the mechanism underlying the influences of parental rejection on children’s anxiety, and the studies explored the mechanism underlying the influences of children’s anxiety on were parental rejection bare. Hence the present study intends to explore the mechanism between parental rejection and children’s anxiety based on prior research. Given the current situation of our country that mothers are the major fosterers in families and they have more exchanges and interaction with their children, therefore the present study intends to investigate the relationship between maternal rejection and children’s anxiety and theirs moderating effects.The present study used a longitudinal design with a sample of 1168 mothers of students who were recruited from two elementary schools in Jinan, Shandong Province. Mothers were assessed at two points in time in an internal of a year. And the short version of the Parent-Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire(Parent-PARQ/S), the Spence Child Anxiety Scale for Parents(SCAS-P), the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List(ISEL), and the Child Behavior Questionnaire(CBQ) were respectively used to collect data. The data of maternal rejection, children’s anxiety, social support of mothers, and children’s temperament were collected to investigate the relationship between maternal rejection and children’s anxiety and theirs moderating effects. The main findings of the current study were as follows:1. There were no significant differences between children genders or grades for maternal rejection.2. There were significant differences between genders for children’s anxiety, girls showed significant higher levels of anxiety than boys.3. There were significant positive correlations between maternal rejection and children’s anxiety.4. There were bidirectional relationships between maternal rejection and children’s anxiety. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that maternal rejection at time 1 could positively predict children’s anxiety at time 2, and that children’s anxiety at time 1 could positively predict maternal rejection at time 2. That is to say, there were both parent-driven effects and child-driven effects in the relationships between maternal rejection and children’s anxiety.5. The negative emotion dimension of children’s temperament moderated the effects of maternal rejection on children’s anxiety, and the lower levels of negative emotion relieved the negative effects of maternal rejection on children’s anxiety.6. The mother’s social support moderated the effects of children’s anxiety on maternal rejection, and the higher levels of mother’s social support relieved the negative effects of children’s anxiety on maternal rejection.