Child-based Worth and Self-Esteem: The Context of High School Entrance Examinations

• In Event: Academic Development of Chinese Adolescents: A Systematic Perspective of Child, Family, School, and Culture

Abstract

Background:
When parents’ self-worth is contingent on their children’s performance (i.e. child-based worth), they may experience daily fluctuations in self-esteem following children's success and failure (Ng et al., 2014). Focusing on the period when high school entrance exam results were released in China, this diary study tested the idea that Chinese parents' self-esteem would fluctuate on days when they learned that their children did well or poorly.

Method:
Participants were 92 Chinese parents (Mage = 40.34 years, SDage = 4.11; 84.8% female) whose children were preparing to take the high school entrance exam. Prior to the exam, parents were asked to complete a baseline survey in which they reported on their child-based worth and various demographic variables. Following the exam, parents were asked to complete online surveys for 13 days. Each day, they reported on their self-esteem, whether examination results were released, and whether their child’s performance was satisfactory or exceptional (coded as a success) or disappointing (coded as a failure). Multilevel regression analysis was used to analyze the data. Continuous between-participant variables were grand-mean centered, while continuous within-participant variables were group-mean centered.

Results:
According to the null model, the intraclass correlation coefficient indicated that 59.2% of the variability in self-esteem scores lay between participants, supporting the development of a multilevel model. As expected, the main results revealed that parents’ child-based worth interacted with their child’s failure in predicting their self-esteem, β = -0.28, p = .046. Parents with high (1 SD above the mean) child-based worth had lower self-esteem on failure days compared to days without success or failure, β = -0.63, p = .009, but this was not true for parents with low (1 SD below the mean) child-based worth, b = -0.01, p = .934. However, parents’ child-based worth did not interact with their child’s success in predicting their self-esteem, β = -0.01, p = .953.

Conclusion:
These results suggest that parents with high child-based worth may be particularly sensitive to children’s failure, which poses a threat to their self-esteem, but they may fail to bask in children’s success as the threat of future failure still looms (Ng et al., 2019).

Authors

• Yan LI, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Jing Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Junsheng Liu, East China Normal University

• Florrie Fei-Yin Ng, The Chinese University of Hong Kong