Maternal Attribution and Chinese Immigrant Children’s Social Skills: The Mediating Role of Authoritative Parenting Practices

SYNOPSIS

Objective. This study explores the contributions of Chinese immigrant mothers’ parenting cognitions and parenting practices to their children’s social skills. Design. We used a cross-sectional design to examine the mediating role of authoritative parenting in associations between Chinese immigrant mothers’ parenting attributions and their children’s social skills. Chinese immigrant mothers (N = 208, M_age = 37.36 years) reported their attributions regarding successes and failures in their daily caregiving experiences, authoritative parenting practices, and demographic information. Their preschool children’s (M_age = 4.51 years, 46.2% females) social skills in school were rated by their teachers. Results. Maternal attributions of successful events to uncontrollable causes and unsuccessful events to controllable causes were associated with more authoritative parenting. In turn, more authoritative parenting was associated with more competent social skills in children. In contrast, maternal attributions of successful events to controllable causes and unsuccessful events to uncontrollable causes were associated with less authoritative parenting, which in turn was associated with poorer social skills in children. Conclusions. Promoting Chinese immigrant mothers’ attributions that preserve positive efficacy during daily parenting tasks may enhance their engagement in warm, autonomy-promoting and regulatory parenting, which in turn may facilitate their children’s social skills.

ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONS

Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, E-mail: [email protected]. Huiguang Ren is at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Biao Sang and Junsheng Liu are at East China Normal University.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Role of the Funders/Sponsors

None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participating families and the research assistants who helped collect the data. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions is not intended and should not be inferred.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grant [1R03HD052827-01A2] from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Foundation for Child Development.