Biography
Biography: Yi Sun
Abstract
In recent years, grandparents are playing a very important role in child-caring in China, because both parents have to work but without enough nursery school. However, less parent-child interaction and grandparents’ doting on children and their physical weakness has brought some problems in children’s psychological development. So far few researches have been done about grandparenting. [Objectives] The study aimed to examine the influence of grandparenting on preschool children’s personality and adaptation. [Method] With the cooperation of a kindergarten in Shanghai, 530 parents of 3-6yrs children were invited to participate in the investigation with their consent. Finally 505 of them completed the questionnaire effectively. [Results] Three factors were extracted by exploratory factor analysis for children’s temperament ―stranger shyness (SS), easy frustration (EF) and prosociality (P), and two factors for adaptation―difficulty in attending kindergarten (DAK) and preoccupied attachment to parents (PAP). The mean difference analysis by grade of kindergarten showed that 1st grade children were significantly higher in EF and PAP than 3rd grade children, and lower in P but higher in DAK than 2nd and 3rd grade ones. The correlation analysis suggests that there were significant relation between parenting style and children’s personality and adaptation. The only-grandparents parenting style related to higher EF and PAP, but lower Prosaicality, especially in 1st grade children group. [Conclusions] Although with children’s growth, their emotion-control ability, prosociality and adaptation in kindergarten will be improved, the only-grandparents parenting style still may have some negative influence on children’s personality and adaptation than only-parents parenting or co-parenting with grandparents.