The Mother-Child Relationship and Children’s Behaviours: A Multilevel Analysis in Two Countries

Abstract

We examined the influences of culture, maternal malaise, household chaos, and both family-wide and child-specific aspects of parenting on children’s adjustment in a socioeconomically diverse sample of 118 English and 100 Turkish families. Each family included two children aged 4-8 years, enabling the separation of within- and between-family factors by modelling the multilevel structure of the data. Mothers reported about the parent-child relationship, contextual factors, child behaviours (internalising, externalising and prosocial). Maternal differential treatment, age, and gender were tested as sources of within-family variance, and culture, household chaos, maternal malaise, and family-wide parenting were tested as sources of between-family variance. The current study adds to the literature by showing the effects of maternal treatment were different for Turkish and English children. Conversely, similar effects across cultures were revealed for age, gender, household chaos and maternal malaise.