Abstract

Background: Parents’ own histories of growth any experience of being abused or bullied) are regarded as one of the factors contributing to the difficulty in child-raising that those parents face. The objective of this research is to find the features of the difficulty in child-raising and resilience of mothers with past experience of adversity.
Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted targeting 4,013 mothers who were raising young children aged 1.5 years or older. The survey items were the history of growth, the child raising environment, difficulty in child-raising, and A chi squared test and the two sample t test were used for the analysis. This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tokushima University Hospital.
Results: The level of difficulty in child-raising was significantly high in the group “without stable family environments” during childhood in contrast with the group “with stable family environments” and in the group “with past experience of being bullied” in contrast with the group without such experience. The resilience of the group “without stable family environments” during childhood were significantly lower than the group “with stable family environments,” and so were the resilience of the group “with past experience of being bullied” than the group without such experience. The resilience of mothers with past experience of adversity was characterized by being low, especially in terms of sociability.
Conclusion: This research has found that past experience of adversity has an impact on the difficulty in child-raising that currently nurturing mothers face. It is important for childcare support with a focus on resilience for mothers with experience of adversity to not only assist them in terms of environmental factors but also be based on the understanding of what perception they have.