Parenting Stress

Parenthood brings immense amounts of joy, pride, personal growth and other good things to those with children; it can also bring a lot of challenges for parents. Being a parent can be one of life’s most joyful and unexplainable experiences. Parenting and motherhood requires hard work physically and emotionally. Also, it needs great deal of sacrifices for the growth of children. Perhaps, it is the juggling of so many roles and tasks that’s why parenting stress commonly occur. (www.all-about-motherhood.com/parenting stress.html)

Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, Intellectual development of a child as he/she grows (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/parenting). Parents’ self images are shaped by their interactions with their children (Turner and Helms, 1990) and mentally picture the things they think it should be especially on personal behavior of children.

Within any family, parenting is a challenging process. Parents may be more or less reactive to the challenges of raising a child. The extent to which parents experience stress in their parenting roles, in particular, has important implications for parent, child, and family functioning.

Being parent can be one of the most joyful and rewarding experience for mothers, but sometimes the demands and hassles in everyday life causes stress. The additional stress of caring for children can make parents feel angry, anxious, or just “stressed out”. Those tensions are normal, inevitable part of family life, and parents need to learn ways to cope so that they don’t feel overwhelmed by them. (http://www.cmha.ca/bins/content_page.asp). A parenting stress study in Florida State University found that parents have significantly higher levels of depression than adults who do not have children (http://stress.about.com/od/parentsunderstress/a/depressionrents.htm).

Parenting stress generally refers to a condition or feeling experienced when a parent perceives that the demands associated with parenting exceed the personal and social resources available to meet those demands. Mothers who experience high levels of parenting-related stress report greater psychological stress and lower life satisfaction than mothers with low levels of stress (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990; Thompson, Merritt, Keith, Bennett, & Johndrow, 1993). Parenting stress is also associated with less optimal parenting, lower levels of developmental competence in children, and disrupted family systems (Anthony et al., 2005; Crnic & Acevedo, 1995; Crnic, Gaze, & Hoffman, 2005).

Parenting stress is caused by neglecting parents own needs. Parental stress increases on parent irritability, which can influence their disciplinary practices and initiate response on child behavior. Parents experiencing high level of stress are likely to pay attention on the negative behavior. Children of stressed parents affect social, emotional, behavioral, and developmental well being.Stress negatively influences parents’ perceptions of their children’s behaviors (Bigras, LaFreniere, & Dumas, 1996). Parents who are distress tend to react to their children, rather than engaging with them and responding to them in firm but nurturing ways. As parenting stress is associated with a loss of efficacy and pleasure in parenting. Distress in the parenting role thus has destructive short and long-term effects for both parents and children (Crnic, Gaze, & Hoffman, 2005).Parents practices may increases the probability that children may develop behavioral problems that it can activate the cycle of negative parent-child interaction (Mach and Johnson, 1990).