Intensive Mothering, Maternal Psychological Well-Being, and Children’s Social-Emotional Development in the Chinese Context

• In Event: Emerging Research on Maternal Mental Health

Abstract

Intensive mothering is a prevalent ideology of how a perfect mother should perform. Mothers are often expected to take the primary responsibility of childrearing and raise children in a “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” way (Hays, 1996, p. 7). Mothers employing intensive mothering were widely reported to suffer from stress, anxiety, and a sense of guilt (Rizzo et al., 2013), yet a few studies suggested that mothers could also obtain a sense of pride, self-worth, and achievement from intensive mothering (Cappellini et al., 2019; Yang, 2018). Furthermore, much research has demonstrated robust relationships between maternal psychological well-being and young children’s social-emotional development (Meadows et al., 2007; Tsotsi et al., 2019). However, how intensive mothering relates to maternal psychological well-being and children’s social-emotional development has rarely been examined in the Chinese context, a gap that the current study aimed to address. In addition, as some research showed that Chinese middle-class mothers endured greater parental stress and anxiety than their working-class counterparts (Jin & Yang, 2015), we further explored whether social class would moderate the association between intensive mothering and maternal psychological well-being. The conceptual model was depicted in Figure 1.
This study included 401 Chinese mothers (Mage = 38.34±5.1 years; 44.4% middle-class, 53.1% working-class) with preschool-aged children (Mage = 70.7±6.8 months, 54.8% girls). Mothers reported their endorsement of intensive mothering ideology through the Intensive Parenting Attitude Questionnaire (IPAQ; Liss et al., 2013). The IPAQ captures mothers’ attitudes towards five key aspects of intensive parenting: (1) women instead of men are inherently better caregivers of children (Essentialism), (2) parenting is fulfilling (Fulfillment), (3) parents should stimulate children for their development (Stimulation), (4) parenting is demanding (Challenging), and (5) parents should treat children’s needs as more important than their own (Child-Centered). Mothers’ psychological well-being was measured by the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form (Abidin, 2012) and the Parenting Anxiety Scale (Yang, 2013). The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 2001) was rated by mothers to assess children’s social-emotional development, which included the Externalizing, Internalizing, and Prosocial subscales.
First, the SEM analyses were performed to explore the mediating role of maternal psychological well-being. The results indicated that mothers’ greater endorsement of essentialism, challengingness, and child-centeredness was significantly related to lower levels of psychological well-being. However, mothers’ endorsement of fulfillment and stimulation was unrelated to their psychological well-being. Maternal psychological well-being was negatively associated with children’s externalizing and internalizing problems and positively with their prosocial behaviors. Bootstrapping analyses suggested that mothers’ endorsement of essentialism, fulfillment, challengingness, and child-centeredness was significantly related to children’s social-emotional development via maternal psychological wellbeing (see Table 1). Next, the interaction term between social class and intensive mothering in predicting maternal psychological well-being was added to the SEM model, but no significant interaction effects were found. The current study highlighted how different aspects of intensive mothering might play a different role in mothers’ psychological well-being. It also cautioned us about the possible negative effects of intensive mothering on young children’s social-emotional functioning.

Authors

• Yeqing Li, East China Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Lixin Ren, East China Normal University