The Influence Of Parenting Style On Children’s Anxiety: The Mediating Role Of Emotion Regulation Ability

Preschool children are apt to cry and lose their temper,and are even hard to placate,which are typical symptoms of anxiety in children.A high level of anxiety will easily affect the intelligence,emotion,and social development of children.Such anxiety is a product of psychological,physiological,social,and family factors.Among these factors,parenting style does occupy a very important position.Parenting style has a direct influence on the level of anxiety in children;This paper is committed to investigating parenting style of families on preschool children’s anxiety,children’s emotional regulation as an intermediary variable to further explore the specific mechanism of action between variables,the use of semi-structured interview,through the rich interview data to verify the variable relationship,in order to provide a certain reference for the prevention and intervention of preschool children anxiety phenomenon.The study is divided into two parts.In Study One,the psychometric method was adopted,with 360 preschool children from a public kindergarten in Hubei Province as the research objects,and their parents or major caregivers as the surveyed objects.Questionnaires(Parental Bonding Instrument,Questionnaire on Children’s Emotional Regulation and Development,and Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale)are used as a research tool,and the statistical software SPSS 25.0 was employed for testing the model.In Study Two,by adopting the interview method,12 parents of pre-school children were selected for semi-structured interviews based on the scores of the Parental Bonding Instrument.Nvivo 12 Plus software was used to conduct coding,word frequency analysis and cluster analysis of the interview materials.Thus,the following conclusions are drawn:1.The level of anxiety varies a lot in preschool children with different genders and in different grades,with less anxiety in boys than girls,and the highest anxiety in middle class children,followed by junior and senior class children in succession.2.Preschool boys have obviously higher emotional recognition and understanding than preschool girls;senior and junior class children are found with better emotional regulation than middle class children.3.Parenting style in this study mostly refers to democratic parenting,followed by authoritarian parenting.Indulgent parenting is more often provided to preschool girls,while democratic parenting is more frequently provided to preschool boys.4.Parenting style,children’s emotional regulation,and children’s anxiety are significantly correlated with each other,while children’s emotional regulation plays a mediating role between parenting style and children’s anxiety.Based on the above conclusions,suggestions are offered from the perspectives of parenting education,kindergarten education and management,teachers’ education and teaching to alleviate children’s anxiety.