Maternal Parental Burnout and Sibling Relationships in Chinese Adolescents: Neglectful Parenting Behavior as a Mediator

• In Event: 3-078 - Parental Burnout and its Consequences Against Children

Integrative Statement

Background: Since the implementation of the comprehensive second-child policy in 2016, the number of two-child families in China has risen sharply. However, very little practical information is available for those parents to help them improve sibling relationship quality. The current research was designed to remedy this situation by conducting the study on Chinese adolescents’ sibling relationships. In addition, existing research on parenting burnout is still scarce, in particular the research on the impact of parenting burnout on child development. Based on previous research dealing with parental roles in sibling relationship quality, the present study aimed to examine how parental burnout would affect the children's sibling relationship through the mediator of parenting behavior.
Methods: Young adolescents and their mothers from 208 families in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China participated in this research. Mean age of adolescents (93 boys, 115 girls) was 13.10 years (SD= 1.90). All adolescents in the present study had at least one sibling, with a mean age of 12.72 years (SD= 7.49). The mean age difference between the siblings was 6.82 years (SD =3.46). Mothers were, on average, 39.26 years old and had completed 9.91 years of education. Mothers completed questionnaires that assessed parenting burnout. Furthermore, adolescents competed questionnaires that assessed sibling relationship and mother's parenting behaviors.
Results: We followed current standard practice for mediation analyses (Hayes, 2013), using Model 4 in the PROCESS macro for SPSS. The results showed that for all the four dimensions of parental burnout (i.e., exhaustion, contrast, saturation and distancing), higher levels of maternal burnout led to more neglected parenting behavior, which in turn increased higher levels of adolescents’ avoidance in sibling relations. The same effects were found when the four dimensions were summed up as a composite score.
Discussion: The current findings suggested that mother’s mental statement did affect the child's sibling relationship, and this role was transmitted through parenting. The findings provided a new perspective for improving the sibling relationship. Intervention or prevention should focus on mothers’ maternal mental state in order to improve the sibling relationships. Because of the differet parenting roles between father and mother in a Chinese family, future studies should include fathers to examine this issue.

Author

• Bin-Bin Chen, Fudan University
  Presenting Author