The Role Of Child Temperament On Parenting Style At Toddlerhood

Family is an important starting point for child’s socialization in early childhood. In the family, parents play greatest roles on child’s future development through their characteristics, especially for parenting styles. How to improve parenting styles attracts extensive attention of a lot of researchers.It is in debate whether child characteristics affect parenting styles. According to ecological system theory, children subsystem can also influence parent’s subsystem although parents influence children’s development. Moreover, the process model of determinants of parenting emphasized that child’s characteristics as an independent subsystem plays an important role in dictating parental parenting styles. Based on the two theoretical models, this study focused on exploring the influence of early child emotionality (including distress to limitations, fear, smiling and laughter) on parenting styles (including harsh, concern/protection, acceptance). It would help parents to know about rules of the influence of child emotionality on parenting styles and help them improve the understanding about child emotionality. It also would be helpful to make some necessary intervention measures in advance through predicting parenting styles as early as possible.The present study followed up 281 children and their parents to explore the influence of child emotionality on parenting styles on different development stage. Mother reported child emotionality at the child age of 6 and 14 months, and parents reported their own respective parenting styles when children aged 24 months. Hierarchical regression and simple slope analysis were done for data analysis.The results revealed that child distress to limitations at the age of 6 months significantly and positively predicted maternal and paternal harsh parenting, and significantly and positively predicted paternal concern and protection. Child distress to limitations at the age of 14 months still positively predicted maternal and paternal harsh parenting. Child fear also positively predicted maternal concern and protection. Child smiling and laughter positively predicted maternal acceptance, and negatively predicted maternal harsh parenting, as well as concern and protection.There exists interaction between fear and distress to limits in predicting parental concern and protection. Specially, child distress to limitations at age of 6 months increased maternal concern and protection only when child has lower fear. The interaction between fear and distress to limits could predict paternal concern and protection though the simple slope analysis did not found significant results. Additionally, there also exists interaction between distress to limitations and smiling and laughter. Specially, child distress to limits at age of 14 months increased maternal harsh parenting when child has high smiling and laughter.In summary, the prediction of child emotionality on parenting styles varied with type of negative emotionality, demonstrating that child distress to limitations at the age of 14 months significantly and positively predicted maternal harsh parenting and child fear did maternal concern and protection. The predictive role of child emotionality on parenting style varied with child age, showing that child fear and smiling and laughter at the age of 6 months did not predict maternal parenting style, but did maternal parenting style when children are at the age of 14 months. In contrast, child distress to limitations played a stable influence on harsh parenting styles at toddlerhood at early developmental stage across 6 to 14 months. There exists the interaction between child emotionality and emotionality in predicting parenting styles. Child distress to limitations significantly and positively predicted both paternal and maternal harsh parenting. The prediction role of child fear and smiling and laughter on parenting styles varied with gender of parents at the child age of 14 months. Similar result was observed for the prediction role of the interactions between child emotionality and emotionality.