An Ecological Approach to Analyzing Variables in the Parenting Stress of the Working Mothers

취업모의 양육 스트레스에 영향을 미치는 생태학적 변인 탐색

The objective of this research is to investigate the relation between the parenting stress, recognized by the working mothers, and associated variables systematically. For the purpose, I analyzed the demographic of the working mothers and surrounding variables at the levels of microsystem, mesosystem, and macrosystems, to relate with respect to the parenting stress problem. The research composes the sample space of working mothers having children less than 6 years old. The data were analyzed by the statistical method based on frequency, percentile, Pearson's correlation, hierachical and multiple regression. The main results of the research can be summarized as follows: According to the independent effects of diverse ecological systematic variables, there are shown that 11 independent variables can describe about 55.6% of the parenting stress of the working mothers. Among these variables, 'satisfaction about the child care' is the most significant factor, which covers about 34.5%. Additionally, the next significances are observed from such variables as 'temperament of children' (8.2%), 'satisfaction of marriage' (5.1%), 'support of spouse' (1.5%), 'level of education' (1.9%) and so on. In conclusion, it is strongly recommended to compensate and restructure the child care systems more systematically, to afford more reliable parenting environment to the dual earner mothers and fathers and children simultaneously.