Cultural Imperatives on Parenting As a Source of Stress? the Longitudinal Investigation of the Interactive Effect of Parenting Scripts and Parenting Practices on Parental Well-Being

Background and Purpose: Being a new parent could be a stressful event in one’s life. In addition to taking care of the newborn, cultural imperatives on parenting have also been proposed as another sources of stress. This was shown in various ethnographic studies on parenting in which the adoption of different cultural imperatives on parenting (the parenting scripts), such as preparing children for future competition, letting children grow naturally, and raising global children have created a source of anxiety for modern parents. However, little is known regarding whether the scripts would change as the children grow. Furthermore, to practice parental roles according to the scripts could be a challenging task. Therefore, the discrepancy between parenting scripts and practices may impede parental well-being. The current study investigated two research questions: 1) How many trajectory groups of parenting scripts held among these mothers over time? 2) What was the impact of the discrepancy between parenting scripts and practices on parental well-being?

Methods: The current study used data from a panel study, the Kids in Taiwan: National Longitudinal Study of Child Development & Care Project. Mothers with a 3-month child were interviewed in 2016. They have been recontacting every 6 months since then. We used the first five waves of the data in this study when the child was around 2.3 years old (48.9% girls; 51.1% boys). The final analytic sample consisted of 4,575 mother-child pairs. The mean age of the mothers was 32.4 years old, over half (51.2%) had a college degree, and had a median family annual income around $26,000.

A composite score was calculated. We used questions regarding whether the parent had high achievement expectations for their children and believed in high-demanding parenting as the indicators of the parenting script, so that high score in parenting script indicated an achievement-focus and demanding parenting style. A three-item scale of parental discipline was used to assess the parenting practices. High scores in the scale showed mothers placed a strict discipline upon their children.

Growth mixture models were used to identify trajectory groups in parenting script across time and growth curve models were used to explore the interactive effects between changes in parenting practices and the script groups on mother’s well-being.

Results: Five groups of the scripts were identified: low constant (5.5%), low increase (2.8%), average constant (20.2%), mid-high constant (57.0%), and high constant (14.5%). The parenting scripts were relatively stable across time. An interactive effect between parenting script trajectory group and parental discipline significantly predicted mothers’ well-being. For mothers held more strict parenting scripts across time (i.e. being in the mid-high and high constant groups), the practice of discipline would impede their well-being.

Conclusions and Implications: The study identified five trajectory groups of parenting scripts at population-level not shown in previous qualitative studies with longitudinal data. The findings extended our understanding of the change and stability of early parenting scripts. Furthermore, the discrepancy between scripts and practices did impede the well-being of parents.