The Relationship Between Parental Acceptance-rejection And Children Subjective Well-being:The Mediating Role Of Children Emotion Regulation

Subjective well-being is the overall evaluation of life quality in accordance with the standard set by oneself and a comprehensive psychological trait of measuring individual quality of life. There were three basic characteristics of subjective well-being: subjective, integrity and stability, both subjective and objective factors would influence subjective well-being. Parental acceptance and rejection form the warmth dimension of parenting. As a stable parenting behavior, parental acceptance-rejection could influence significantly children subjective well-being with different research results. Furthermore, one study shows that paternal acceptance-rejection affects children subjective well-being more than maternal acceptance-rejection does(Amato, 1994). Whether does paternal acceptance-rejection affect children subjective well-being more than maternal acceptance-rejection does in Chinese culture context? Researches show that parental acceptance-rejection could significantly affect children emotion regulation. Parental care and acceptance could promote the development of emotion regulation, and Parental rejection and denial could positively predict immature emotion regulation strategies. Besides, other studies have shown that children emotion regulation is significantly associated with subjective well-being, and positive emotion regulation could keep an emotional balance and improve subjective well-being. In conclusion, we suspect that children emotion regulation may act as the mediator between parental acceptance-rejection and children subjective well-being. This study will examine the impacts of parental acceptance and parental rejection on children subjective well-being respectively and whether children emotion regulation acts as the mediator between parental acceptance-rejection and children subjective well-being.This study was designed to take cross-sectional study and focused on747 five and six students of primary school with 716 valid questionnaires. In this research, children's version of “Parental Acceptance-rejection Questionnaire”(short form)( Rohner,2005), the Chinese version of “ Emotion Regulation Checklist”(Shield & Cicchetti, 1995), “Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale”(Huebner, 1994), and “Pleasant Emotions Scale”(Diener, Smith & Fujita, 1995) were used to measure parental acceptance-rejection, children emotion regulation, students' life satisfaction and children positive and negative affect. The results were statistically analyzed by using SPSS20.0 and AMOS17.02.The main conclusions are as follows:1 Children subjective well-being had a higher level with life satisfaction and positive affect above average and negative affect below average. In addition, there were significant gender differences in life satisfaction and positive affect and girls' life satisfaction and positive affect were significantly higher than boys'; besides, there was significant grade differences in life satisfaction and fifth grades' life satisfaction was significantly higher than sixth grades'.2 There was no significant gender and grade differences in parental acceptance-rejection. In addition, maternal acceptance was significantly higher than paternal acceptance, while there was no significant difference between maternal rejection and paternal rejection.3 Children emotion regulation is above average. Moreover, There was no significant gender and grade differences in children emotion regulation.4 Parental acceptance could significantly predict children subjective well-being, and paternal acceptance affected subjective well-being more strongly than maternal acceptance. In addition, after controlling parental acceptance, maternal acceptance could improve children subjective well-being partly through influencing children emotion regulation; however, after controlling maternal acceptance, parental acceptance could not improve children subjective well-being partly through influencing children emotion regulation.5 Parental rejection could significantly predict children subjective well-being. In addition, after controlling maternal rejection, parental rejection could decrease children subjective well-being partly through influencing children emotion regulation; moreover, after controlling parental rejection, maternal rejection could decrease children subjective well-being partly through influencing children emotion regulation.