Abstract
Poor children living in detrimental environment are facing a lot of mental and physical healthy threatens, not only hurt children’s development of brain but also led to emotional disorder and problem behavior. Parent-child relationship and family social economic status are discovered having vital effect on children’s whole life development, which will shape character, behavior and emotion of children. Social economic status can predict some children’s problem behavior. Good parent-child relationship can become protect element for poor children, helping children to defeat setbacks. To our knowledge, many researchers have devoted to find out the direct effect of poverty disadvantages on children, however, the mechanism of poverty effecting on children problem behavior still not clear and the policy of psychological aiding poverty is also exploring. In this situation, the current study focuses on parent-child relationship and family social economic status how to effect on poverty children’s problem behavior and we hope to get a glimpse of the underlying process of poor children problem behavior.
In this study, 247 poverty children (126 boys, mean age = 10.76, SD = 1.16) as subjects join in our questionnaire survey. We test 6 variables including social economic status, mother-child relationship, father-child relationship, depression, self-control ability and problem behavior and all the data was analyzed by R2.3.2. We examined the correlation between two variables and constructed a multiple mediates model using structural equation model, which have two mediate variables, including depression and self-control ability.
The correlation results show that: (1) Parent-children relationship significantly relates to depression, self-control ability and problem behavior. (2) Social economic status and depression relate significantly. (3) Depression, self-control ability and problem behavior are significantly relating to each other. The multiple mediates model shows that: (1) Depression and self-control ability are two mediators of the mediate effect of social economic status and parent-child relationship on poverty children’s problem behavior. Parent-child relationship and economic status have indirect effect on poor children though depression and self-control ability. (2) There are 57.60% mediation effects relating to depression mediator and it can negatively predict poverty children problem behavior. (3) Self-control ability involved in 57.15% variation of poverty children problem behavior. (4) About 91.25% mediation effects relate to parent-child relationship mediate path and the difference between parent-child relationship and economic status is significant.
We can conclude that: (1) Parent-child relationship has a bigger effect on poor children than economic status. Parent-child relationship has a tight relationship on children’s mental health and children’s self-control ability. (2) Depression and self-control ability are very important mediate paths on children problem behavior. They should be given more attention in aiding poverty projects. At the same time, the self-control ability of poor children can be predicted by depression.
Finding of this study give us some suggestions: The aiding poverty policy should concern about parent-child relationship. Improving parental relationship will become a protective factor for poor children. Meanwhile, social and government also should focus on mental health of poor children. Mental health is the most significant mediator in the whole study. It can convey the pressure of poverty and also be a reason for children’s bad behavior and weak self-control ability. But government and social charity institutions help poor children by giving them money not concentrating on psychological interventions. So in the future, government and social charity institutions should increase effective psychological counseling mechanism for poor children.
Key words
social economic status /
parent relationship /
depression /
self-control /
problem behavior
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Jian Guan.
;The effect of social economic status, parent-child relationship on poverty children’s problem behavior[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2018, 41(5): 1145-1150
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