The Effects Of Father's Function On Preschool Children's Self-control

Early childhood is a critical period of self-control development, developing good self-control ability has positive effect on children's development of personality, academic achievement and physical health. Parenting is an important factor for children's self-control development. The past studies of the factors affecting the children's self-control paid close attention to the impact on self-control of mother and mother-children relationships, seldom examined father's function in children's self-control development. Fathers, as an important role in family parenting and toddler's main game partner, help children to learn a variety of rules and to be independent and persistent. Therefore, the research of father function in development of children's self-control has the extremely vital significance.This research,we tested the effects of father's function on the children's self-control by investigating the influence of father involvement and father presence on self-control by used questionnaire survey and experimentation. In study 1, firstly we got data of children's self-control, father's involvement and mother involvement from teachers and parents of nearly 500 preschool children aged 3-5 through methods of questionnaire survey, then we analyzed the level and characteristics of father involvement and preschool children's self-control, and we explored the influence of father involvement on preschool children's self-control. In study 2, we activated the preschool children's psychological presence of father in two ways: priming with the photo of the participant and his/her father and language materials about the participant's father, then used EID(externally imposed delay) to test self-control of children immediately.The results show that:1)father involvement had no significant differences on children's sex or age, the higher level of education the father had, the higher level of involvement he had; 2)preschool children's self-control increases with age, preschool children's self-control has obvious sex difference, the girls' self-control is significantly higher the boys'; 3) fathers' involvement predicted children's self-control, even after controlling for mothers' involvement, the prediction effect is significantly; 4)The presence of father can temporarily improve the self-control ofpreschool children.