The relationship between parental child rearing attitudes, anxiety and the dependency behaviors of 4-to-6 year old Turkish preschoolers

Abstract

The major purpose of this study was to explore the relative contribution of the anxiety level and the protection degree of the mother, feeding schedule during infancy, mother's use of withdrawal of love as a disciplinary technique and mother's use of punishment for aggression toward parents to the dependency behaviors of Turkish preschool children of 4-6 years old. The results indicated that the children of those mothers who scored higher on the Parental Attitude Research Instrument (PARI-LeCompte, LeCompte and 6zer, 1978) a scale which measures the child rearing attitudes of mothers and the Trait Anxiety Scale (Spielberger, 1966) obtained significantly higher dependency scores than the children of those mothers who scored lower on Total-PARI and the Trait-Anxiety Scale. Among the other variables it was found that the mother's use of withdrawal of love and punishment for aggression and type of feeding schedule were not found to be significant in explaining the dependency behavior of the sample children as measured by the Dependency Scale (Erer, 1983).