Abstract:

An emotional development of a child to a large extent depends on psychobiological predispositions of his parents and social and cultural conditioning of the family. From a developmental psychology’s perspective one may presume that individual characteristics of parents play a vital part in the creation of a role model for a child and contribute to his attainment of emotional maturity. The process of gaining emotional maturity rests on meeting the child’s needs by his parents. On the theoretical level there exists a mutual interaction between fulfilment of the child’s needs, his emotional development and parents’ psychological and social predispositions.

The research carried out for the purpose of this study, in which 360 participants took part, focused on the following two aspects. Firstly, parents’ resourcefulness was examined under the assumption that if at least one of the parents shows a high level of resourcefulness then the entire family will function well in the whole social spectrum. Secondly, emotional maturity of the child was also investigated. On the basis of the literature review, it may be concluded that emotional maturity is made up of three factors: emotional stability of a child, positive emotional reaction/attitude towards himself and proper emotional reaction/attitude towards another child. Moreover, emotional maturity is an element of child’s school readiness. It also seems that emotional maturity necessary to commence school education constitutes a major factor in child’s successful adaptation to school environment and the demands connected with it. The subject of the present study was resourcefulness of a parent and emotional maturity of his/her six-year-old child. Thus, the participants were parents and their children aged six. The aim of the research was to establish a linear correlation between life resourcefulness of a parent and emotional maturity of his/her six year old child. Consequently, the following research question was posed: are there any statistically significant differences between a parent’s resourcefulness and the aforementioned indicators of child’s emotional maturity? It was hypothesised that differences between a parent’s resourcefulness and the particular indicators of child’s emotional maturity are statistically insignificant. The following statistical tools were used: Anova test and linear regression analysis.

The obtained results lead to a conclusion that there are statistically significant differences between a parent’s everyday life resourcefulness and emotional stability of the child, positive emotional attitude of the child to himself and proper emotional attitude of the child towards other children. Moreover, on the basis of a linear regression analysis one may conclude that the higher the level of a parent’s resourcefulness, the higher the level of emotional maturity of the child. Furthermore, according to a regression model, the increase in emotional maturity of a six-year-old child in 66% of instances is attributable to life resourcefulness of his parents, the remaining 34% is due to other random factors.

Keywords:

Everyday life resourcefulness, child’s emotional maturity, school readiness.