Longitudinal relations among parenting daily hassles, child rearing, and prosocial behaviors in Turkish children

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Parental child rearing behaviors predict children's levels of prosociality (Eisenberg and Valiente, 2002; Hastings, Utendale, and Sullivan, 2007). Parents' daily hassles are continuous sources of stress that can cause difficulties in effective parenting (Belsky, 1984; Crnic and Greenberg, 1990), which can both directly and indirectly affect children's outcomes. Although stress has been linked to prosocial behaviors (e.g., McGinley et al., 2010), studies on the relations between daily hassles and children's prosocial behaviors are lacking. The present study was designed to examine the longitudinal relations between parents' daily hassles and young children's prosocial behaviors, as well as the mediating role of parenting practices in a sample of children from Turkey. The final sample was 159 middle class Turkish preschool children and their mothers. Overall, we found longitudinal evidence that parenting daily hassles, warmth, inductive reasoning, and physical punishment were significantly associated with children's prosocial behaviors. There was a direct link between parenting daily hassles and prosocial behaviors three years later. Additionally, there was partial support for the expected indirect effect of parenting daily hassles on the children's prosocial behaviors through parenting practices. The present findings show partial support to family stress model in predicting children's prosocial development, and extend our understanding of children's prosocial development to a non-Western, predominantly Muslim culture.