The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between parents' psychological negligence and children's ego resilience and adaptation to school, and also examine the control effect of children's ego resilience in the relationship between pa...
The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between parents' psychological negligence and children's ego resilience and adaptation to school, and also examine the control effect of children's ego resilience in the relationship between parental negligence and children's adaptation to school.
This research was conducted among 623 male and female children in Grades 5 and 6 living in Seoul and Kyunggi areas, and the data was collected through a self administrative survey. To measure the psychological negligence of parents, the author modified and translated for this research the measuring tools used by Koh Sunghye (1992), Chae Hyejeong (1993) and Hong Eunju (1998), which have formulated questions based on the Psychological Maltreatment in Children and Adolescent of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (1995) and the standards suggested by the International Standing Committee on Child Abuse (ISCCA). Park Eunhee's questionnaire (1996) was used to measure children's ego resilience while Kim Yongraei's questionnaire (1993) was used to measure children's adaptation to school.
The collected data was analyzed using the SPSS statistics program. First, the frequency and the percentage were calculated to find out general background and characteristics of the surveyed people. Cronbach ‘s α was calculated to test the reliability of the measures used in the research, and the factor analysis was conducted to measure the validity. Also, the descriptive statistics, t-test, and one-way ANOVA were used to examine the overall distribution and tendency of the psychological negligence of parents. Correlation analysis was applied to find out the relationship between parents' psychological negligence and children's ego resilience, and regression analysis was applied to examine the influence of the parental negligence on children's ego resilience and adaptation to school. Finally, moderated regression was adopted to measure the effect of parents' psychological negligence and children's ego resilience on adaptation to school as a moderating variable. The results are summarized as follows:
First, the rate of psychological negligence in the average Korean household is not very high. As for psychological negligence based on background variables of parents and children, male children experience more psychological negligence than female children. Children who show a mid to high-range level of achievement experienced more negligence that those who show a low achievement. In contrast, parents' level of education, occupation and income level do not make much difference when it comes to psychological negligence.
Second, the psychological negligence of parents have a negative influence on children's ego resilience. In particular, it can exert the most negative influence on vitality, which is a subordinate factor of ego resilience and the ability to approach problems in life in active and appellative ways.
Third, parent's psychological negligence exerts a negative influence on children's adaptation to school. It affects the subordinate factors of children's adaptation to school in the order of adaptation to teachers, to classes, to the environment, to friends and to school life. Among them, psychological negligence is found to have the most negative influence on adaptation to teachers.
Fourth, regarding the control effect of neglected children's ego resilience on adaptation to school, ego resilience is found to control the effect on children's overall adaptation to school and the subordinate factor, adaptation to friends.
All these results indicate that psychological negligence affects children's ego resilience and adaptation to school. From this point, this research suggests the importance of the roles of parents, ideal ways to educate children and of children's ego resilience in adverse situations.