Parenting and young children's emotional self ...

775759 research-article2018

ECR0010.1177/1476718X18775759Journal of Early Childhood ResearchKim and Holloway

Original Article

Parenting and young children’s emotional self-regulation in urban Korean families

Journal of Early Childhood Research 1–14 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X18775759 DOI: 10.1177/1476718X18775759 journals.sagepub.com/home/ecr

Soojung Kim

Pyeongtaek University, Korea

Susan D Holloway University of California, USA

Abstract The present study was designed to examine the relationship of Korean mothers’ psychological resources and discipline style to their children’s emotional self-regulation development. Structural equation modeling was conducted with a sample of 234 Korean mothers of kindergarten-aged children in the Incheon area in South Korea. The results indicated that maternal harshness negatively predicted and inconsistency positively predicted children’s emotional self-regulation development. Second, mothers’ psychological resources (i.e. parenting self-efficacy, enjoyment of parenting) predicted less harshness, inconsistency, and permissiveness and more responsiveness. Third, the direct path from enjoyment of parenting to permissiveness in parenting behaviors was moderated by the child’s gender. The results indicated that certain parenting behaviors, particularly permissiveness and inconsistency, may have culturally distinctive effects on children’s development in Korea.

Keywords culture, enjoyment of parenting, parenting, parenting self-efficacy, self-regulation

Introduction Self-regulation refers to the “capability of controlling or directing one’s attention, thoughts, emotions, and actions” (McClelland and Cameron, 2012: 136). Children’s self-regulatory competence is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes, including social acceptance from peers, prosocial behaviors, and high academic achievement and school engagement, along with avoidance of negative behaviors (Bandy and Moore, 2010; Graziano et al., 2007; Zimmerman and Schunk,

Corresponding author: Soojung Kim, Department of Child and Youth Welfare, Pyeongtaek University, 111 Yongyi-Dong, Pyeongtaek-si, Gyeonggi-Do 450-701, Korea. Email: [email protected]

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2001). Given the significance of self-regulation in explaining variation in a range of developmental outcomes, it is important to understand what leads to individual differences in self-regulation development. Two factors have been proposed: children’s dispositional characteristics (e.g. age, gender, temperament) and the social context in which development occurs (Karreman et al., 2006; Li-Grining, 2012; Raver, 2004). The present study focuses on the family context, arguably the most significant source of support for children’s development of self-regulation skills. The literature on family socialization in some US contexts has demonstrated the positive effects on children’s self-regulation capability of experiencing a constellation of parenting behaviors that are sometimes referred to as authoritative parenting, including autonomy granting, limit setting, low power assertion, and responsiveness (Baumrind, 2012; Kuczynski, 1984; Patterson and Bank, 1989; Silverman and Ragusa, 1990; Steinberg et al., 1992). Conversely, parenting behavior that is authoritarian (i.e. coercive, controlling, and harsh) appears to impede optimal self-regulation development in early childhood, as does parenting that is overly permissive, in which parents avoid making maturity demands and do not set appropriate limits on misbehavior. Also problematic is inconsistent parenting, in which parents may set limits in some situations only to ignore them at a later time or in another situation, or may fail to follow-up when a child has engaged in misbehavior. The association between parenting behavior and children’s self-regulation has been demonstrated in societies as diverse as the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Ghana (Chirkov et al., 2005; Marbell and Grolnick, 2013). Based on these apparently robust findings, some have suggested that parenting that is neither too harsh nor overly permissive, that is responsive to the child’s needs, and that is consistent across time and disciplinary contexts is universally promotive of children’s selfregulation skills (Grolnick, 2003; Soenens and Beyers, 2012). In contrast to this position, researchers who take a sociocultural perspective argue that very strict or even harsh parenting may not be detrimental to children’s development in communities where such forms of control are part of a generally accepted parenting approach that is motivated by positive intentions toward the child, as opposed to resulting from parental stress, hostility, or ignorance (Chao, 1994; Deater-Deckard and Dodge, 1997). Although this sociocultural perspective has been explored with respect to certain developmental outcomes, the link between parenting and children’s self-regulation has not often been tested in countries where strict parenting is a culturally salient approach. To address this gap, we explored the nature of the association between discipline style (including responsiveness, strictness, permissiveness, and inconsistency) and children’s self-regulation in a sample of mothers from South Korea, a society where many parents endorse a strict approach to childrearing, including corporal punishment. A second focus of this study was to examine the individual psychological factors that predisposed parents to engage in particular kinds of parenting behavior. We focused on two aspects of parents’ psychological wellbeing: their parenting self-efficacy (PSE) and their enjoyment of parenting. PSE refers to parents’ self-reflective judgments about their ability to be successful in that role (Coleman and Karraker, 1997). Research conducted in the US suggests that PSE and enjoyment of parenting are associated with a parenting style that is relatively warm and responsive (De Haan et al., 2009; Dumka et al., 1996; Gondoli and Silverberg, 1997; Hess et al., 2004; Izzo et al., 2000). While the importance of PSE and enjoyment of parenting have been clearly established in studies conducted in the US, less is known about their role in promoting effective parenting in other societies. In this study, we examined whether mothers with more robust psychological resources are more likely to engage in the forms of parenting that are associated with children’s self-regulation development. As we will argue presently, it is possible that these relationships play out somewhat differently in Korea than in the Western context.

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The context of parenting in Korea Most research on parenting in Korea has focused on the culturally distinctive behaviors associated with Korean parents’ intense focus on educational attainment and school achievements, a focus that is seen as stemming from Korea’s Confucian cultural heritage (Jeon, 2007; Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 2004). In particular, studies suggest that many Korean parents are quite strict and demanding in order to accustom their children to the high standards and self-discipline required for academic success (Kim et al., 2005; Kim and Park, 2006). A key question posed in the current research is whether this harsh treatment is associated with poor developmental outcomes for children, as has been the case in the US and other national contexts. Our thinking is more in line with a sociocultural perspective that seeks to take into account the culturally specific norms in a particular society because these norms create a framework for evaluating the meaning and function of particular parent behaviors. With respect to Korea, some authors have argued that parental harsh discipline is consistent with the Confucian notion that children should be raised to respect their elders and even to obey them unquestioningly (Kim et al., 2005). To the extent that Korean parents who exert harsh control are acting in ways that are culturally appropriate, their children, in turn, may interpret this authoritarian behavior as common and well intentioned and may be more likely to comply with parental demands rather than react with the anger or resistance (Yang and Rosenblatt, 2001). Compared to the literature on harsh or authoritarian parenting, the effects of permissive parenting have been less often considered in studies of Korean family life. In research conducted in the United States, permissive parenting is typically associated with poorer developmental outcomes for children, presumably because permissive parents fail to create conditions that encourage mature behavior (Baumrind, 2012; Grolnick, 2003). However, some evidence suggests that permissiveness is more common and less damaging in Asian countries where educational pressure is very strong, particularly within middle- and upper-middle-class families (Zevenbergen and Hu, 2002). To the extent that Korean parents experience great pressure to ensure their children’s academic success, they manage their children’s daily schedules tightly, filling their time after school with long hours of private lessons and other academic activities (Kim et al., 2012; Park et al., 2011). In such contexts, even very exigent parents sometimes temper their strong demands for high academic achievement by being permissive with respect to nonacademic matters (Hulei et al., 2006). This parenting approach may appear not only permissive but also inconsistent to a Western observer, to the extent that Korean parents enforce self-discipline and impose harsh consequences in some areas but permit self-indulgence or immature behaviors in others. To a Korean parent, however, this apparent inconsistency may be intended to signal a willingness to consider the child’s feelings and may thus be interpreted positively by the child.

Sources of individual variation in parenting within Korea In the present study, we are not only interested in examining how cultural norms of parenting in Korea may affect the meaning and effects of particular parenting practices in that country. In addition, we sought to acknowledge the importance of within-country variability in parenting, and to identify precursors of the parenting behavior of individuals within the society (Gjerde, 2004; Holloway, 2010; Turiel and Perkins, 2004). As noted previously, our study focuses on the role of PSE as one predictor of parenting that is authoritative rather than authoritarian, permissive, or inconsistent. Our expectation is that Korean mothers who feel confident in their parenting approach (i.e. those with high PSE) may be more able to resist the strong cultural pressure to focus exclusively on academic achievement and more able to respond sensitively to children’s

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Figure 1. Conceptual model.

needs that those who lack such confidence. These more confident mothers may thus be less likely to oscillate between harsh and permissive behavior than those who are fearful that their childrearing efforts will not be successful (Park and Kwon, 2009; Yang and Shin, 2008). A similar relationship may be predicted with respect to parents’ enjoyment of the parenting role. Those who find the role of parent to be stressful, unpleasant, or unrewarding may be particularly likely to engage in harsh or permissive parenting and less likely to employ a sensitive, responsive approach. In addition to these individual psychological predictors, we also examined the extent to which parenting behavior was linked to family demographic factors (i.e. family size, mother’s education, family income) and children’s personal characteristics (i.e. age and gender). As we will discuss presently, the two factors that were most strongly implicated in these relationships were mother’s educational attainment and child gender. Mother’s education has been extensively investigated as a crucial associate of positive parenting, and is typically conceptualized as a form of human capital that exerts a pervasive impact on the tendency of parents to engage in behavior associated with the authoritative style rather than harsh or permissive parenting (Black et al., 2003; Currie and Moretti, 2003). In addition to mother’s education, child gender merited careful consideration in this study, particularly as Korean society continues to endorse strongly differentiated norms for males and females (Hong et al., 2011).

The current study The central question posed in this study is whether parenting practices related to sensitivity, harshness, permissiveness, and inconsistency mediate the association between parents’ psychological wellbeing, on one hand, and children’s capability for self-regulation, on the other. The conceptual

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model guiding the research questions is presented in Figure 1. Examining the first link in this conceptual chain, the association of parent well-being to parenting practices, our review of the literature suggested two alternative possibilities. The first possibility is that Korean mothers who view parenting as an unrewarding, difficult activity will, like their Western counterparts, engage in the kind of harsh or insensitive parenting that is seen in Western contexts as disadvantageous to children (Bong, 2003; Lee, 2006; Park and Kwon, 2009; Yang and Shin, 2008). Alternatively, if such apparent harshness and lack of sensitivity is actually culturally normative rather than an indication of stress or hostility, it might be that it is Korean mothers who experience a sense of parenting competence and enjoyment who engage in the very strict parenting associated with negative outcomes within the United States. Similarly, by examining the association of these two indicators of psychological wellbeing with the parenting dimensions of permissiveness and inconsistency, we can explore whether or not each of these is associated with a positive orientation toward parenting among Korean families. Having explored the link between discipline style and children’s self-regulation skills and the link between psychological resources and discipline style, we then examined the strength of the full mediated model, which tested whether the relationship between psychological resources and children’s self-regulation competence was mediated by mothers’ discipline style. We expected that the mediated model may be somewhat different depending on the gender of the child and educational attainment of the mother, and thus included them as moderators.

Method Participants The participants included 234 Korean mothers of kindergarten-age children living in the Incheon area in South Korea. The children were between 58 and 81 months old (M = 70.76 months, standard deviation (SD) = 6.81), and their gender was relatively equally distributed: 116 males (49.6%) and 118 females (50.4%). On average, the mothers were 37.41 years old (SD = 4.01). More than half of the participants (54.7%) reported an average annual income between KRW 24,000,000 and KRW 50,000,000, slightly below the average household income of the general population in Korea (Korean Ministry of Government Legislation, 2015).

Procedures We obtained permission from the principals of four kindergartens in the Incheon area to recruit parents for the study. Classroom teachers distributed an invitation letter and survey packet to their students’ parents. Mothers completed the anonymous survey at home and mailed it to the research team. Teachers completed an assessment of each student’s social competence. All procedures were approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board.

Measures The survey consisted of several scales originally developed in English. A bilingual member of the US research team translated all survey items into Korean. A native Korean speaker who was fluent in English but not familiar with the subject of the present study then performed a back translation (Foster and Martinez, 1995) to further refine the language. For each component of the model, confirmatory factor analyses using maximum likelihood estimation in AMOS 21.0 for Windows were also conducted to explore whether the items reflected that particular latent construct.

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PSE. Mothers’ PSE was assessed using the Berkeley Parenting Self-Efficacy Scale—Revised (Suzuki et al., 2013). Mothers used a six-point scale, ranging from 1 (not at all confident) to 6 (very confident), to indicate how confident they were in performing each of seven parenting behaviors related to supporting their child’s social-emotional and cognitive development (Parental Strategies Subscale, or PSS), such as “How confident are you that you can explain things so that your child will understand?” and 11 items that involved teaching their child an age-appropriate task (Child Outcome Subscale, or COS), such as “How confident are you that you can teach your child to be polite?” The two-factor measurement model for mothers’ PSE fit the data acceptably: chi-square (n = 234, df = 129) = 264.004; p = .000, comparative fit index (CFI) = .931, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .067. Hu and Bentler (1999) suggested a cutoff criterion of >.95 as the standard for a relatively good fit for the CFI and