Poster #138 - Immigrant Chinese Mothers’ Heritage Culture Maintenance and their Children’s Adjustment: A Moderated Mediation Model

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parents of Chinese descent tend to utilize more psychological control than European American parents (e.g., Ng, Pomerantz, & Deng, 2014). Researchers have explored the culturally specific meanings of parental psychological control (PPC), particularly the factors that may contribute to it, including cultural values (e.g., Cheah et al., 2016), and the effects of PPC on children’s adjustment (see Pomerantz & Wang, 2009, for a review). Previous studies have also demonstrated that parental cultural values and contextual stressors interact to predict parenting and children’s adjustment (e.g., Li-Grining, 2012), and that daily hassle impact children’s development through parenting (Gulseven et al., 2017). However, no study has examined all of these associations in one model. Therefore, we examined: (1) the mediating role of PPC in the relation between Chinese immigrant mothers’ Asian cultural values and their children’s adjustment difficulties; and (2) the moderating role of daily hassles in the association between cultural values and PPC.

Immigrant Chinese mothers (N = 256, Mage = 37.77 years old, SD = 4.41) with young children (N = 256, Mage = 4.57 years old, SD = 1.13) in mid-Atlantic U.S.A. reported on their demographic information, psychological maintenance of traditional Asian cultural values (Kim & Hong, 2004), daily hassles (DeLongis et al., 1988), PPC (Olsen et al., 2002), and their children’s socioemotional and behavioral difficulties (Youth In Mind, 2005).

Moderated mediation analyses, controlling for child gender, maternal age, education, and length of time in the U.S. was conducted in PROCESS (Figure 1). Maternal psychological maintenance of Asian cultural values was positively associated with PPC, b = 0.08, p < .01, which in turn was associated with greater child difficulties, b = 0.47, p < .001. However, the indirect effect of maternal Asian cultural values on child difficulties was moderated by daily hassles. Specifically, the indirect effect was positive and significant only at mean, ab = 0.02, SE = 0.01, 95% CI[.002, .051], and higher levels, ab = 0.06, SE = 0.02, 95% CI[0.018, 0.110], of daily hassles.

Immigrant Chinese mothers with higher levels of traditional Asian values were more likely to engage in psychologically controlling parenting, which was in turn associated with more adjustment problems in their children. However, the link between Asian value maintenance and PPC was significant only when immigrant mothers reported higher levels of work- and family-related daily hassles. Although PPC is more normative and frequently practiced in Asian cultures, immigrant Chinese mothers were more likely to adopt such practices with increasing Asian values only when they experienced high stress, perhaps resorting to these practices because of limited resources. Moreover, the forms of PPC that mothers engage in when highly stressed may be more hostile and reactive, and thus, more detrimental to children’s adjustment. The findings suggest that intervention programs aiming to support parenting in immigrant families could also benefit from promoting positive coping strategies for daily hassles that they experience.

Authors

• Wei Yu, Foshan University
  Presenting Author

• Kathy Vu, UMBC Department of Psychology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jing Yu, NICHD
  Non-Presenting Author

• Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author