This study attempts to find the relationship between the role satisfaction of preschooler’s mother, her verbal control style, and the child personality.
Two research questions of this study are as follows:
1. What is the relationship between the role satisfaction of preschooler’s mother, her verbal control style, and the child personality?
2. How is the role satisfaction of a mother related to her child personality and her ability to explain related to her verbal control style?
To answer the above two research questions, surveys were distributed and collected from 300 mothers of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old child currently attending a nursery or kindergarten in Busan and Gyeongsangnam-do for about 4 weeks from 12 August to 13 September 2013. A total of 250 were then finally analyzed of the collected surveys.
The data collected in this study were analyzed for Pearson’s relationship and a multiple regression using the PASW 18.0 statistics program.
The results of this study were as follows:
First, for the relationship between the role satisfaction of Preschooler’s mother, her verbal control style, and the child personality characteristics, the data showed that the mothers’ role satisfaction and child personality characteristics were related as follows. General role satisfaction, a lower factor among role satisfaction, was positively related to the child dominance, emotional stability, reflectiveness, and sociability. The parent-child relationship showed a positive correlation with the child emotional stability, reflectiveness, and sociability. The spouse’s support showed a positive correlation with the child reflectiveness and sociability, while the support of children showed a positive correlation with the child general activity, dominance, reflectiveness, and sociability. Conflicts in parenting showed a positive correlation with the child emotional stability, reflectiveness, and sociability, and a negative correlation with their general activity and impulsiveness.
Of the mothers’ verbal control styles, mothers’ control through ordering had a positive correlation with the child impulsiveness. A negative correlation with their emotional stability, reflectiveness, and sociability. Mothers’ authoritative control had a positive correlation with the child general activity, dominance, and impulsiveness. A negative correlation with their emotional stability. The mothers’ affective control showed a positive correlation with the child general activity, dominance, and impulsiveness.
Second, an investigation into the mothers’ role satisfaction with lower factors of child personality characteristics; the ability to explain of lower factors of verbal control styles showed that conflict in parenting and children’s support for role satisfaction impacted the child general activity, while only children’s support had an impact on the child dominance. Conflict in parenting had the greatest impact on the child emotional stability and impulsiveness. On the other hand, children’s support, parent-child relationship, and ordering control had an impact on the child reflectiveness. Only children’s support had an impact on the child sociability.
In conclusion, this study confirmed that the role satisfaction of preschooler’s mother and her verbal control style are factors that can impact a child personality characteristics. This result shows that measures to help reduce ordering and authoritative control as well as enhance mothers’ role satisfaction would positively impact the personality development of child. In addition, given that a mother’s proper role playing leads to children growing up with their intrinsic characteristics, this study is meaningful in that it provides a new lesson on parental education.