Objective To investigate the relationship between maternal acceptance and early-school-age migrant children's empathy as well as the mediating role of maternal coping style with children's negative emotions. Methods: From June 14 to June 21 in 2013, we enrolled 325 students aged 8 to 10 from Beijing ambulatory schools through convenience sampling method. Among the students, 150 students received pretest, and 175 students received formal testing by completing 175 questionnaires with 173 effective questionnaires recollected. After the exclusion of 4 questionnaires with obvious data missing (data missing rate >10%), data of 169 students were analyzed. The questionnaire was composed of parental acceptance-rejection questionnaire, revised coping with children's negative emotions scale and empathic, prosocial response to another's distress scale. Results: The score was(3.0±0.5) for maternal acceptance, (3.6±0.7) for the coping style of problem solving, (3.6±0.9) for the coping style of comforting, (3.3±0.8) for the coping style of encouraging emotion expression and(5.4±0.8) for children's empathy. The three maternal coping styles with children's negative emotions(coping style of problem solving, coping style of comforting and coping style of encouraging emotion expression) were moderately and highly correlated with each other(P<0.01); the three styles had medium positive correlation with maternal acceptance degree (P<0.01); the three styles had positive correlation with children's empathy (P<0.01); maternal acceptance degree was positively correlated with children empathy (P<0.01). Structure equation model analysis showed that maternal coping style with children's negative emotions had complete mediating effect in the relation between maternal acceptance dgree and children's empathy with a fairly good fitting result (χ2=40.55, df=24, P=0.020, CFI=0.98, NNFI=0.97, RMSEA=0.064, SRMR=0.046). The test using Bootstrapping technique showed that, through maternal coping with children's negative emotions, maternal acceptance degree had an indirect mediating effect on children's empathy which was 0.21 with 90%CI(0.11, 0.32)and the mediating effect was remarkable. Conclusion: Maternal acceptance facilitates the empathy of early-school-age children, and maternal coping style with children's negative emotions had a complete mediating effect. Copyright © 2016 by the Chinese General Practice.

residential mobility Maternal behavior emotions

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