Acceso usuarios
Angelica Arace, Donatella Scarzello
Parenting has short and long-term effects in various spheres of children’s development, even though the causal connections between determinants of parenting, quality of parental behaviour and child’s psychological well-being are still not clear (Collins et al., 2000; O’Connor, 2002; Bornstein & Bornstein, 2007). The main goals of this study are: 1) to describe patterns of parenting practices within the area of maternal social and didactic caregiving (Bornstein, 1989); 2) to describe the distribution of maternal parenting practices patterns by children’s age and gender and by mother’s age and socioeconomic and cultural level.
The empirical study has been conducted with a normative sample of 211 Italian mothers with a child aged between 7 and 11, with a homogeneous gender distribution. Data were collected by means of selfreport questionnaire on parental practices. Factor analysis and subsequent cluster analysis permitted identification of three types of maternal parenting practices patterns defined as responsive (30.0%), ambivalent (45.4%), and coercive/rejecting (24.6%). Results show a higher presence of dysfunctional parental clusters for mothers with a medium-to-high educational level and with male children.
