Poster #83 - Migration Arrangement and Mobile Phone Parenting in Chinese Work-Separated Families: Parental Stress as a Mediator

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Objectives: In rural China, numerous parents of young children decide to migrate to domestic urban regions for preferable careers and incomes. Because of financial and institutional barriers, they either arrange for their spouses to stay hometown with their children or completely leave their children to the at-home grandparents. Nevertheless, many migrant parents turn to mobile phones to achieve their parenthood in a distance. Despite the substantial evidence on the relationships between parental stress and general parenting, the parenting process of mobile phone parenting (MPP) has been unclear. The current study aimed to compare MPP behaviors and parental stress between migrant parents with different family migration arrangements and examine whether parental stress mediates the possible associations between migration arrangements and MPP.
Methods: Rural-to-urban migrant parents of children aged 3 to 6 were recruited online from China’s social media platforms and completed electronic questionnaires through Qualtrics. After conducting quality-control screening procedures, the final sample consisted of 547 rural-to-urban migrant parents (50.8% mothers) who properly reported their demographical information, family migration arrangement, parental stress, and MPP behaviors (indexed by a self-developed and validated scale – the Mobile Phone Parenting Practices Questionnaire, MPPPQ, measuring six parenting dimensions: responsivity, autonomy granting, psychological control, proactive control, directive control, and harsh punitive control). We first compared the means of parental stress and MPP between the parents with in-hometown spouses (PWS, 33.5%) and parents with no in-hometown spouses (PWNS, 66.5%). We subsequently used mediation analyses to examine six parallel mediaton models (one for each parenting variable) after controlling for demographical variables, including parent age and sex, parent’s completed years of education, parent’s monthly income, child age and sex, duration of separation.
Results: Compared to PWNS, PWS reported more psychological control practices and lower levels of parental stress, but there was no significant group difference betweenthem. In the mediation models, all the total effects between migration arrangement and parenting dimensions were not significant. Parental stress fully mediated the effects of migration arrangement on mobile-phone-mediated autonomy granting, proactive control, directive control, and harsh punitive control. Partial mediation effects of parental stress were found in the associations between migration arrangement and responsivity/psychological control.
Conclusion: It seems that in families that have decided to have either parent live with their young children in rural hometowns (PWS), the parents who migrated alone feel less stressed in parenting. When taking parenting stress into account, they were prone to use more proactive and directive control, responsivity, autonomy granting, less psychological control, and harsh punitive control when communicating with their children through audio or video calls. Although further research is necessary to be able to make any causal inferences, it seems that the PWS arrangement is associated with less parenting stress in the migrated parents, which may go together with increased responsivity and decreased psychological control. This seems to suggest that less responsiveness and greater psychological control in PWS arrangements may be counteracted or suppressed by reduced parental stress.

Authors

• Ruwen Liang, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven)
  Presenting Author

• Karla Van Leeuwen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven