The Role of Child's Temperament and Mother-child Emotional Bonding in Predicting the Anxiety of 3 to 6 Year-old Children of Working Mothers

Background and Aim: Children, especially children of working mothers, experience a high level of anxiety and it is necessary to conduct research with the aim of predicting and designing programs to reduce it. Therefore, the aim of this study was determine the role of the child's temperament and mother-child emotional bonding in predicting the anxiety of 3 to 6 year-old children of working mothers. Methods: This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was cross-sectional from type of correlation. The research population was all children 3 to 6 year-old with working mothers in Urmia city in 2022 year. The sample size was 200 people, which this number were selected by purposive sampling method. The research tools were Hegwit et al.'s middle childhood temperament questionnaire (1982), Kitamura et al.'s mother-child emotional bonding scale (2015) and Rodgers et al.'s parental version of anxiety scale for children (2016). The data were analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficients and multiple regression with enter model in SPSS software version 24. Results: The findings showed that the child's positive temperament (r=-0.479) and mother-child emotional bonding (r=-0.596) had a negative and significant relationship with the anxiety of children of working mothers and the child's negative temperament (r=0.471) had a positive and significant relationship with their anxiety (P<0.001). Also, the child's positive and negative temperament and mother-child emotional bonding significantly could predict 48.3% of the anxiety changes of children with working mothers, which in this predicting according to the rate of Beta the share of mother-child emotional bonding was higher than other variables (P<0.001). Conclusion: The results indicated the effective role of the child's temperament and mother-child emotional bonding in predicting the anxiety of 3 to 6 year-old children of working mothers. Therefore, to reduce their anxiety, can be used the educational workshops to reduce child's negative temperament and improve child's positive temperament and mother-child emotional bonding.