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Title: Effects of Children's Behavior Difficulties on Mother's Self-Esteem
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. McCool, Laurie
Effects of Children's Behavior Difficulties on Mother's Self-Esteem
Master's Thesis, The Ohio State University, 1999
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Self-Esteem; Temperament

While the impact of parenting on children is taken for granted, the reverse relationship is generally ignored. In this paper, I test for the significance of a feedback effect of children's behavior on maternal self-esteem - if a mother perceives her child as difficult, does the mother suffer a loss of self-esteem? I use 1,570 women, their children, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and its Child-Mother Supplement. From the NLSY main survey, I extracted mothers' self-esteem scores from before the birth of their first child and after they were mothers to measure changes in self-esteem, and from the Mother Supplement I obtained mothers' perception of their children's behavior. By controlling for other potential influences, independent of the children's behavior, I attempt to isolate the influence of the mothers' perceptions of their children's behavior on changes in their self-esteem between 1980 and 1987. The inclusion of mothers' self-esteem from a time before they were mothers addresses the time ordering condition of causation - changes in mothers' self-esteem are not due to conditions which existed prior to the potential influence of their children's problematic behavior (or their perception thereof). My analyses conclude that, controlling for other variables considered important to an individual's self-esteem, children's behavior difficulties is a statistically significant factor in predicting changes in their mothers' self-esteem.
Bibliography Citation
McCool, Laurie. Effects of Children's Behavior Difficulties on Mother's Self-Esteem. Master's Thesis, The Ohio State University, 1999.