The relationship between Maternal Ideology and Parenting Stress in Mother of middle and high school students: The Mediated Effects of Mother’s Child-Based Self-Worth and Positive Mother-Child Relationship

Objectives The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of mothering ideology on parenting stress and to access the mediating effects of mother’s child-based self-worth and positive mother-child relationship. Methods To this end, 279 middle-aged women who live in large cities, including **, **, ** were chosen as subjects for this study. The noted structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. Results We compared the model fits of the research model and the competition model, and found that the com-petition model was the best model for the present data. The results of the study showed that there are relation-ships between noted mother’s child-based self-worth fully mediated as noted in the relationship between moth-ering ideology and positive mother-child relationship, and positive mother-child relationship fully mediated as seen in the relationship between mother’s child-based self-worth and parenting stress. These findings indicated that the incident of mothering ideology influenced parenting stress through mother’s child-based self-worth and positive mother-child relationship with dual mediation effects. Conclusions The deeper the mother's ideology is internalized, the more a mother’s child-based self-worth to child, which means that the mother becomes less positive about her relationship with the child, resulting in pa-renting stress. That’s why the results of this study provides insight into specific psychological mechanisms that mothering ideology effects parenting stress of the middle-aged women. Also, it has significant meaning the can be used as empirical basis data to seek counseling strategies to decrease parenting stress of middle-aged woman.