Poster #157 - The Trajectory of Mother's Parenting Stress over a Seven-year Period: Relation to Marriage Satisfaction and Father's Involvement.

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

This study examined the trajectory of parenting stress among Korean mothers from their child’s birth to seven years old and the impact of marriage satisfaction and father’s involvement on the mother’s parenting stress. Mother's parenting stress has been considered one of the factors impacting child outcome in the field of child development (Deater‐Deckard, 1998; Neece et al., 2012). However, there is little evidence on the mechanism of parenting stress across time.
The trajectory of chronic parenting stress is a meaningful effect on children across young childhood as a critical development points. Family system theory points out that family members interact with each other as an emotional unit in the family system (Bowen, 1990). This implies that the emotional connections or interdependence supports between mother and father operate each family member emotional status, such as parenting stress through nurturing their child. Especially, first time mothers are struggling to take care of their newborn at the first year and have higher parenting stress, so mother’s marriage satisfaction and father’s involvement may have a key role on parenting stress when their baby is an infant (Campbell et al., 1995). Following this expectation, it was hypothesized that mother’s marriage satisfaction and father’s involvement when their child is an infant are related to the changes in parenting stress for 7 years.
The longitudinal data is from Korean children panel study from 2008 to 2014 was used in this study. A total of 1638 family had to have newborn and live in South Korea in 2008 for eligibility and have participated every year until 2014. The sample included 1683 mothers, aged 29 to 46 years old and their child’s age from 6 to 7, of which 48% were girls in 2014. Growth Model (GM) was implemented with HLM 7 (Garson, 2013). Full Maximum likelihood (FIML) estimator was used.
The results indicate that mothers with higher marriage satisfaction in their first year of birth are more likely to have lower parenting stress for a consecutive seven-year. Also, the degree of father’s parenting involvement in the first year of childbirth is negatively associated with mother’s parenting stress. These findings are in line with the research hypotheses but also imply that marriage satisfaction and spouse support in the first year of childbirth matter for mother’s parenting stress in a long term. Given that the first year of childbirth is most challenging time for mothers (Gray et al., 2012), marriage satisfaction and father involvement at the beginning of childcare are critical forces to mediate mother’s parenting stress. Interestingly, there is a yearly change of the effect of mother’s marriage satisfaction on parenting stress. This specifically indicates that mothers with more marriage satisfaction during the first year of childbirth experienced more decline in parenting stress over a seven-year. This finding implies that marriage satisfaction at the time of childbirth is a lasting force behind lower parenting stress in the long term. These results may contribute to improving programs and policies for mothers to decrease parenting stress considering the initial mother’s emotional status for the long-term effect.

Author

• Hyerim Shin, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
  Presenting Author