This study aims to investigate the relationship between parental attitude and children's playfulness and to highlight the importance of it. This study also aims to induce the need of change of parent recognition on this matter and the interest in chil...
This study aims to investigate the relationship between parental attitude and children's playfulness and to highlight the importance of it. This study also aims to induce the need of change of parent recognition on this matter and the interest in children's playfulness, to suggest right parental attitude, and to give useful information on parent education to children's educational institutions.
To achieve this purpose, the specific research questions are as followings:
1. How does parental attitude differ?
2. How does parental attitude differ by gender and age?
3. How does children's playfulness differ by gender and age?
4. What is the relationship between parental attitude and children's playfulness?
The subjects of this study are 147 children aged 4 and 5, their father or mother, and their teachers from educational institutions located in Daejeon. The questionnaire for parental attitude is Schaefer's "Maternal Behavior Research Instrument", translated by Wonyoung Lee (1983). For children's playfulness, Children's Playfulness Scale(CPS) is used, which was invented with the concept of playfulness defined by Barnett (1991) & Lieberman (1977).
The questionnaires were distributed to parents for parental attitudes and teachers for children's playfulness in each educational institution. The data were analyzed with SPSS program. Frequency and percentage were produced in order to understand general characteristics of research subjects and T-test was used to know the differences by age and gender. Pearson Correlation was used for relationship between parental attitude and children's playfulness and linearregression was implemented for analysing the impact of parental attitude on children's playfulness.
The research results are as followings:
First, there is significant differences of parental attitude between fathers and mothers in all the categories of parental attitudes: loving, refusing, autonomous, and controlling attitudes.
Second, there is significant difference of parental attitude by children's gender, in particular in the refusing attitude, while there is not any significant difference of parental attitude by children's age. However, in the loving attitude, 4-aged group gained significantly higher marks than 5-year group.
Third, there is significant difference of children's playfulness by children's gender and age. Particularly in physical playfulness as one of sub-category of children's playfulness, boys show better physical spontaneity than girls significantly. There is significant difference of children's playfulness by children's age. For cognitive spontaneity as one of sub-category of children's playfulness, 5 aged children show higher marks than 4 aged children while 4 aged children show statistically higher marks in happiness expression than 5 aged children.
Fourth, there is significantly positive relationship between father's loving attitude and children's social spontaneity. As father's controlling attitude is higher, physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity of children is higher. There is significantly positive relationship between mother's controlling attitude and children's physical spontaneity while there is negative relationship between mother's refusing attitude and children's cognitive spontaneity. However, overall there is not significant relationship between father and mother's parenting attitude and children's playfulness.