Children’s Interpersonal Relationships at School, Mother-Child Relationships, and Mothers’ Psychological Well-being

• In Event: 582 - Section on the Sociology of the Family. Families, Health, and Well-being

Abstract

Although research tends to focus on the influences of contexts of parents’ lives on parent-child relationships and children’s health and well-being, contexts of children’s lives may influence parent-child relationships and parents’ health and well-being. Using panel data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 963), this paper examines how children’s peer aggression involvement and their relationships with teachers are related to mother-child relationships and mothers’ psychological well-being when children are in third, fifth, and sixth grades. Analyses using fixed-effects models suggest that any forms of children’s peer aggression involvement—victims, bully-victims, or bullies—and higher levels of child-teacher conflict are positively related to mother-child conflict largely through children’s increased externalizing and internalizing problems. Children’s experience of being bullied (victims) is positively related to maternal depression and anxiety even after controlling for children’s increased externalizing and internalizing problems and mother-child conflict. Children’s involvement in both bulling and being bullied (bully-victims) is positively related to maternal depression and anxiety largely through children’s externalizing and internalizing problems. Children’s engagement in bullying (bullies) is positively related to maternal anxiety only in third grade. Child-teacher conflict is positively related to depression and anxiety for mothers with lower socioeconomic status only. These findings suggest that children’s interpersonal environment at school is a stressor that influences mothers’ mental health directly as well as indirectly through producing other stressors such as children’s externalizing or internalizing problems and mother-child conflict.

Authors

• Kei Nomaguchi, Bowling Green State University

• Marshal Neal Fettro, Bowling Green State University