Parental Control And Children’s Anxiety:The Mediating Effect Of Parent-child Relationship

Children’s anxiety has been the focus of researchers in recent years.Children with long-term anxiety cannot learn and work normally,and it will affect their physical and mental health.Studies have shown that children’s anxiety is stable,and children with anxiety will always be affected by this disorder and may lead to new conditions.Parents are the first teachers of children,and their parenting style plays an important role in children’s growth.The parenting style means the behavior tendency put up in parents’ disciplines in daily life.It is an integrated embodiment of parents’ educational concept and behavior.In 1984,Baldwin extracted the factor of control from the parenting style,believing that control is the limitation of parents on their children.In the context of Chinese culture,parental control,as a parenting style is often used in the process of raising children and relatively stable upbringing,has very important and special significance for children’s development.Previous studies have shown that there is a significant correlation between parental control and children’s anxiety.Most studies have suggested that there is a significant positive correlation between parental control and children’s anxiety,such as causing guilt,withdrawing love and limiting self-expression.There was a significant negative correlation between parental behavior control and children’s anxiety.Parent-child relationship is a kind of internal family relationship based on blood relationship,which extends almost the whole life of a person by birth to the end of life.As long as both parents and children exist,this relationship will never end.Parenting style has a certain influence on parent-child relationship.Studies have shown that the quality of parent-child relationship will decrease when parental psychological control level rises,and vice versa.Recent research on children’s anxiety has the following deficiencies.First,these studies focused on a specific anxiety condition,such as social anxiety,separation anxiety and examination anxiety.Second,more attention has been paid to the maternal parenting style,not to the pater,in the studies of children’s anxiety and parenting styles.Third,most studies did not divide parental control into two dimensions(psychological control and behavioral control),or focused only on psychological control.Forth,the concept of parental control and related studies wasbased on the western cultural background(most of the subjects are middle-class white teenagers).Little scholars have studied the meaningful exploration of parental control in the context of Chinese culture for cross-cultural research.In view of the above considerations,this study intended to investigate children’s anxiety and its relation to parental control and parent-child relationship in Chinese culture context.First,it helped to understand the relationship between family-related factors and children’s anxiety,and provided family guidance and interventions for Chinese parents.Second,it could also provide a basis for the mental health development of children and promote the harmonious development of parent-child relationship.This had important application value for preventing and solving children’s anxiety.In this study,a total of 815 students from grade 1 to grade 5 in 7 primary schools in Jinan were selected as participants through longitudinal study.Using Spence Children Anxiety scale(SCAS),Parental Control scale and Parent-child Relationship scale as the research measures,parental report method was adopted to collect data.The study was administered twice in a group of subjects,with an interval of one year.The measurement time in the first year was marked as T1,and the measurement time in the second year was marked as T2.After excluding invalid questionnaires that only one parent answered or both parents answered incomplete questionnaires,there were786 valid questionnaires for the whole family.The main conclusions of this study were as follows:(1)Children’s anxiety has significant differences in gender and measuring time.The degree of Children’s anxiety of primary school girls was significantly higher than that of primary school boys,T1 children’s anxiety was significantly higher than T2children’s anxiety.The degree of physical disorder and social phobia of primary school girls was significantly higher than that of primary school boys,and the degree of separation anxiety of grade 1 children was significantly higher than that of other grade children.(2)T1 paternal psychological control and T1 maternal psychological control were negatively correlated with T1 father-child relationship and T1 mother-child relationship,T1 paternal behavioral control and T1 maternal behavioral control were positively correlated with T1 father-child relationship and T1 mother-child relationship.T1 children’s anxiety was positively correlated with T1 parental psychological control,and negatively correlated with TI parent-child relationship.T2children’s anxiety was positively correlated with T1 parental psychological control,and negatively correlated with T1 parent-child relationship,but no significant correlation with T1 parental behavioral control.(3)There was not only actor effect but also partner effect between the paternal behavior control and parent-child relationship: paternal behavioral control not only affects the father-child relationship,but also affects the mother-child relationship.(4)Parent-child relationship played a mediation role between parental control and children’s anxiety.The father-child relationship played a mediating role between paternal psychological control and children’s anxiety.The mother-child relationship played a mediating role between maternal psychological control and children’s anxiety.