High stress level has become an unavoidable part of life in current society. It affects everyone, and children are no exception. Indeed, children can be more prone to great stresses since they are immature in self-expression. This study examines how a...
High stress level has become an unavoidable part of life in current society. It affects everyone, and children are no exception. Indeed, children can be more prone to great stresses since they are immature in self-expression. This study examines how a preschooler’s daily stress is related to the maternal child-rearing attitude, and attempts to find an efficient solution for reducing preschooler’s daily stress level. With this purpose, the research topics were selected as follows.
1. Does child-rearing attitude differ according to the maternal background, e.g., age, education, religion, and occupation?
2. Does a daily stress level of preschoolers differ according to the background factors of children, e.g., gender, age, primary rearer, and birth order?
3. How is the maternal child-rearing attitude related to the daily stress of a child?
The sample of this study consists of 135 children of age 2 to 7 who are enrolled in a private kindergarten D located in Dong-gu and a kindergarten D attached to an elementary school in Taeduk-gu, Daejeon City, in 2008, along with 135 mothers of the children.
Maternal Behavior Research Instrument (MBRI) developed by Scheafer(1959) and Korean Preschooler's Daily Stress Scale (KPDSS) were used as a test tool in the analysis. KPDSS, which is designed to measure the daily stress perceived by children, was answered by mothers instead, considering that the mothers can give more accurate answer about their child than immature children themselves. The collected data were subsequently analyzed using SPSS win 10.0 to produce summary statistics such as mean and standard deviations and to conduct t-test and F-test in order to examine differences between each group. For correlation analysis, Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient was computed.
The study results can be summarized as follows.
First, among the maternal background, including age, education, religion, and occupation, only the education and occupation had an influence on the maternal child-rearing attitude. As for education, it turned out that the mothers with education higher than university level have more affective and hostile attitude than those with statutory schooling. Moreover, the mothers with statutory schooling showed more controlling attitude than those with junior college education. As for occupation, the mothers with a job had more hostile attitude, while those without a job showed more controlling attitude. Meanwhile, the maternal attitude did not show significant difference between different age and religion groups.
Second, the daily stress of preschooler did not vary in relation to the background factors of the child, such as gender, age, primary rearer, and birth order.
Third, there was a significant positive relationship between hostile maternal attitude and preschooler’s daily stress level in every sub categories. This implies that, a hostile attitude has larger impact on increasing the daily stress level of a child than any other maternal child-rearing attitudes.
Based on the results from this study, I make several suggestions regarding early childhood education and preschooler’s daily stress. First, it is important to develop a test for maternal child-rearing attitude as well as a measurement standard for children’s daily stress that can take into account the specificity of Korea. Second, early childhood education institutes should provide mothers with realistic and practical child-care programs. Finally, a policy and social plan should be prepared at a society level in order to support solving the problems associated with high stress level in early childhood.