母亲守门行为与父子依恋的关系:父亲教养投入的中介作用

Maternal Gatekeeping Behavior and Father-Adolescent Attachment: The Mediating Role of Father Involvement

以597个核心家庭的父亲、母亲和青少年为研究对象,通过问卷调查探讨了母亲守门行为与父子依恋的关系以及父亲教养投入在其中的中介作用。结果表明:(1)母亲开门行为正向预测父子依恋,母亲关门行为负向预测父子依恋;(2)母亲开门行为通过正向预测父亲教养投入的部分中介作用间接预测父子依恋,而母亲关门行为通过负向预测父亲教养投入的部分中介作用间接预测父子依恋。研究结果扩展了母亲守门行为的作用效果研究,对家庭教育实践具有一定的指导意义。

Maternal gatekeeping behavior refers to mother’s effort in facilitating and inhibiting father-child interaction, which represents the executive function of co-parenting on family life. Enormous studies have conducted to explore the effect of maternal gatekeeping behavior on father-child interaction and father-child relationship, while these studies mainly focused on the infant or young children family, and little attention has been paid to the core feature of father-child relationship - father-child attachment. Thus, the main purpose of this study was to extend previous studies and explore the effect of maternal gatekeeping behavior on father-adolescent attachment. Furthermore, family system theory indicates that there are direct and indirect path from maternal gatekeeping behavior to father-adolescent attachment. Empirical research found that maternal gatekeeping behavior, including gate-closing and gate-opening behavior, was related to father involvement;father involvement had strong contribution on child development. Accordingly, the second purpose of this study was to explore the mediating role of father involvement between maternal gatekeeping behavior and father-adolescent attachment.A total of 597 nuclear family(father, mother and one adolescent of each family) were recruited from Beijing, Henan and Guangdong Province. They were asked to complete self-report questionnaire, including mother reported Maternal Gatekeeping Scale(Puhlman, 2013), father reported Father Involvement Inventory(Wu et al., 2015), and adolescent reported Mother-child Attachment Sub-scale of Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment(Armsden & Greenberg, 1987). The data was analyzed using correlation analysis, structural equation modeling by SPSS 21.0 and Mplus 7.11.Correlation analysis showed that maternal gate-opening behavior was positively related to father-adolescent attachment and father involvement;on the contrary, maternal gate-closing behavior was negatively related to father-adolescent attachment and father involvement. Besides, father involvement was positively related to father-adolescent attachment. Structural equation modeling showed that the total effect of maternal gate-opening behavior and gate-closing behavior on father-adolescent attachment was significant. More precisely, maternal gate-opening behavior had positive predicating role on father-adolescent attachment, and maternal gate-closing behavior had negative predicating role on father-adolescent attachment. Furthermore, father involvement had partial mediating role between maternal gatekeeping behavior and father-adolescent attachment. Maternal gateopening behavior was correlated with higher level of father involvement, which ultimately predicated higher quality of father-adolescent attachment, and on the contrary, maternal gate-closing behavior was correlated with lower level of father involvement, which ultimately predicated lower quality of father-adolescent attachment. This study extended the research of the effect of maternal gatekeeping behavior to attachment field and explored the ignored effect of maternal gatekeeping behavior. The implication of this study was that mothers as the primary-caregiver of the children and the manager of family life had important role on emotional linkage between fathers and adolescents. In daily parenting children with their spouse, mothers should exhibit more positive encouraging and facilitating behaviors to their spouse. Meanwhile, they should also inhibit their negative control and undermining behaviors. Besides, improving their levels of involvement was also an effective way for fathers to promote their emotional linkage with their children.