Poster #205 - How Parent Comparison Influences Child's Happiness -- the Mediating Role of Parent-child Relationship and Child’s Self-esteem

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Parenting style is an important predictor of child’s self-esteem, happiness (Furnham & Cheng, 2000). For child, lower self-esteem induces more problem behaviours (Wang, et al., 2017), thereby reducing happiness (Twenge, et al., 2017). Parent-child relationship mediates the impacts of parenting style on child developmental outcomes (Xu, 2007). In China, parent comparison is a popular used parenting style: 42% parents very often use and only 7% parents never use (Chen & Tao, 2016). Parents often compare their children’s weaknesses with the strengths of children’s classmates (73.1%) or children of relatives (46.8%). According to the contrast effects of social comparison theory (Lockwood, 2002), the more parents compare, the often things go contrary to their wishes. This study aims to discuss how parent comparison influence child’s happiness, especially the role of child’s self-esteem, parent-child relationship, family social economic status and child’s gender in the influence path.
The data is from "Regional Assessment of Education Quality Programme" of Collaborative Innovation Centre of Assessment toward Basic Education Quality in Beijing Normal University. The sample includes 9,772 boys and 8,079 girls in grade 8 from Zhengzhou city’s junior middle school. Descriptive statistics and structural Equation Models were conducted in this study. The descriptive statistics of the study showed that: (1) 41% children reported their parents often compared them with other children, and 16.1% children reported their parents never compared. (2) Parent comparison had little correlation with family income and had no significant difference between urban and rural areas. That means similar comparison happened in different income families and different living areas. (3) Parent comparison had significant negative correlations with child’s happiness (r=-0.240, p <.000), self-esteem (r=-0.208, p <.000) and parent-child relationship (r=-0.327, p <.000). Results of SEMs showed that: (1) Parent comparison negatively affected child’s happiness (β= 0.520, p <. 000), which was partially mediated by child’s self-esteem ( mediate effect/ total effect = 24.6%) and parent-child relationship (mediate effect/ total effect = 36%). The results indicated that more parent comparison directly reduced child’s happiness, also indirectly leading to child’s low self-esteem and disadvantage of the parent-child relationship, further reduced child’s happiness. (2) There was difference in gender between the two mediating paths (one through self-esteem, the other parent-child relationship), specifically, more obvious in the girl group (respectively, the ab values in the boy group: -0.098 and -0.169, in the girl group: -0.172 and -0.207, Wald Test values: 5.349, p=0.0207). This indicated that girls were more sensitive and more susceptible to parent comparison. (3) The family SES moderated the influence of parent comparison on child’s self-esteem level (β= 0.016, 95% CI do not contain 0). In the family with poor economic condition, the more parent comparison, the lower child’s self-esteem level. However, self-esteem level of children from good SES families would not drop obviously, to some extent, it ascending.

Group Authors

Min Xie, Cai Zhang, Xiaoxiong Lai, Meixuan Zhang, Bin Tang, Yun Wang

Authors

• Min Xie, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Yun Wang, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author