The Associations Between Parenting Emotion Expressiveness,parenting Self-efficacy And Parent-child Relationship Of 3-6 Year Old Children

In order to understand the influence of parental emotional expressiveness on parent-child relationship and the role of parenting self-efficacy in this process,this research adopted the respective Scales to investigate 600 parents of preschoolers in Shanghai.Many statistical methods are applied to data analysis including descriptive statistics,independent sample t test,one-way analysis of variance(ANOVA),correlation analysis,regression analysis,cluster analysis and others.1.In terms of parent-child relationship,the overall level of parent-child relationship was generally good.Mothers had more intimate relationships with children than fathers,while they also had more conflictive relationship than fathers.Fathers were the main force of “introverted” parent-child relationship,while mothers were the main force of extroverted “high variation” parent-child relationship.Parent-child relationship was significantly affected by family annual income,parents’ gender and children’s age.2.As for parental emotional expressiveness,the overall situation was good,but the overall score of fathers was lower than that of mothers while the negative emotional expressiveness was higher than that of fathers.The category of "negative emotion expression" of fathers was larger,while the category of "emotional catharsis" was the majority of mothers.Parental emotional expressiveness was significantly affected by parents’ gender,children’s age and parents’ educational background.3.Among the seven dimensions of parenting self-efficacy,"Protection","Emotional Availability" and "Empathetic Responsiveness" performed better,while the scores of "discipline" and "teaching" were lower.Parents’ educational background,parents’ gender,children’s age and children’s birth order significantly affected the level of parenting self-efficacy.4.In terms of the relationship between the three variables,there was a significant correlation between the parental emotional expressiveness and the parent-child relationship,which provided the incision for the improvement of parent-child relationship;while Parental positive/negative emotional expressiveness indirectly affected the intimacy/conflict parent-child relationship through the mediating effect of parental self-efficacy,which meant Parenting self-efficacy as an important mediating variable also provided a new way to improve the quality of parent-child relationship.Based on the above conclusions,this study has put forward educational suggestions from three aspects(namely parent-child relationship,parental emotional expressiveness and parenting self-efficacy)to improve the current situation and promote the positive interaction between three variables.