The Relationship Between Children’s Social-Emotional Competence, Spiritual Health, and Maternal MetaEmotion Structure Attachment Style

Understanding the influences of parents on children in the process of psychosocial and personality development of children and adolescents has been the focus of psychologists and sociologists. This study aimed to predict the emotional and social competence of the child based on spiritual health and maternal emotional structure according to the mediating role of children’s attachment style.

The statistical population of this correlational descriptive was female primary school students and their mothers in Tehran City, Iran. Of them, 250 individuals were selected by purposive and voluntary sampling method using Klein’s method. The research instruments included Zhu and Ji’s (2012) Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, Polutzin and Ellison’s Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS), and Kern’s Attachment Style Classification QuestionnaireAttachment style. The collected data were analyzed using AMOS.

The obtained results suggested that the structure of maternal metacognition was directly related to children’s attachment style (-0.33); maternal spiritual health and children’s attachment style (0.37); the structure of maternal metacognition and the emotional-social competence of the child (-0.26); mothers’ spiritual health and child’s emotional and social competence (0.18), and the child’s attachment style and the child’s emotional and social competence (0.49). The structure of maternal emotional well-being and the emotional-social competence of the child (-0.16) as well as the spiritual health of the mother and the emotional-social competence of the child (0.18) were indirectly related.

Considering the importance of the child’s emotional and social competence, the emphasis on the influential factors of the present study can be promoted in developing this skill among children. Maternal spiritual health and emotional structure were related to the child’s emotional and social competence through the attachment style of the child; the strongest relationship concerned the relationship between attachment style and emotional and social competence.