The role of child's temperament and mother's attachment and parenting styles in predicting behavioral problems of 3-5 year old children with working mothers

Children's behavioral problems are common and debilitating problems in children, ‎and ‎investigating them is very important. Therefore, the present research was conducted to determine the role of child's temperament and mother's attachment and parenting styles in predicting behavioral problems of 3-5 year old children with working mothers.

This study was a cross-sectional type of correlation. The research population was working mothers’ ‎with 3-‎‎5-year-old children in Urmia city kindergartens in 2021-2022 year with number 353 people that the sample ‎size ‎based on the Krejcie and Morgan table estimated 184 people who were selected by cluster sampling method. ‎The ‎research data were collected with the questionnaires of Revised Temperament (Ellis and Rothbart, 2001), ‎Attachment Style (Hazen ‎and Shaver, 1987), Parenting Styles (Baumrind, 1991), and Behavioral Problems ‎‎(Rutter, 1976) ‎and were analyzed by methods of Pearson correlation coefficients and multiple regression with enter model ‎in SPSS ‎software versions 21.‎

The findings showed that a child's temperament, secure attachment style, and authoritative parenting ‎style ‎had a negative and significant relationship with children's behavioral problems and avoidant; ‎ambivalent ‎insecure attachment styles and authoritarian parenting style had a positive and significant relationship ‎with ‎children's behavioral problems at a level of 0.01; and permissive parenting style had a positive and ‎significant ‎relationship with children's behavioral problems at a level of 0.05. Also, the variables of the child's ‎temperament, ‎attachment style and authoritative and authoritarian mother's parenting style significantly could ‎predict 29 ‎percent of changes in children's behavioral problems (P<0.001).‎

The results of this study indicated the effective role of a child's temperament, attachment style ‎, and ‎authoritative and authoritarian mother's parenting style in predicting the children's behavioral problems.‎ The implications of the obtained results were discussed in the article.