Understanding the Parenting Experience: Assessing the Relationship Between Parenting Stress, Parental Self-Efficacy, and Parental Emotion Socialization in a Community Sample of Parents

• Author / Creator

  Durber, Chelsea M.

• The current dissertation is comprised of three related studies that examine several aspects of parenting, with the overarching goal of generating knowledge that will advance parenting research and support parents in their parenting role. Collectively, the three studies aimed to investigate parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy as correlates of parents’ supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization behaviours. All three studies used a correlational, cross-sectional research design with a sample of mothers and fathers who have children between the ages of 7-11 years. The first study used parallel analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis to examine multiple sources of parenting stress identified in Parent-Child Relationship and Daily Hassles theories of parenting stress to determine how these sources of parenting stress contribute to a broader parenting stress construct. The findings of the first study show that both theories uniquely contribute to a broader parenting stress construct, such that parenting stress may arise from both problematic functioning within the family system as well as parenting daily hassles. The objective of the second study was to use the broader construct of parenting stress identified in the first study and examine how it relates to parents’ supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization behaviours using structural equation modeling. The results illustrate that parenting stress explains significant variance in parents’ unsupportive emotion socialization, suggesting parenting stress may be an important correlate associated with fewer unsupportive emotion socialization behaviours. The goal of the third study was to explore parenting self-efficacy as a correlate of parents’ supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization behaviours using structural equation modeling. The outcomes of study three identify that parenting self-efficacy is related to and explains a small amount of parents’ supportive emotion socialization, indicating there exists a limited relationship between parenting self-efficacy and parents’ emotion socialization. Taken together, each study in the current dissertation worked in concert not only to advance the parenting literature by evaluating and contributing to parenting stress and emotion socialization theory, but also to support parents by encouraging their supportive emotion socialization behaviours and generating new knowledge of stress within the parenting role.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Parenting
  • Socialization
  • Stress
  • Self-Efficacy

• Graduation date

  Fall 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-r0tp-k623

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.