Influence of occupational stress on quality of parent-child relationship among mothers in the Oyo State civil service

Abstract

The quality of parents-child relationship between parents and their children have been found to be linked to the health and social wellbeing of the children. Most times, parents are stressed from working to earn a living for their family thereby impacting the quality of parent-child relationship. This research work sought to examine the influence of occupational stress on the quality of parent-child relationship among multiparous mothers.
The study adopted an ex-post facto research design. The research was conducted on multiparous mothers working in the Oyo State civil service. Systematic and simple random sampling technique was adopted during the course of the research. Three hundred and nine (309) multiparous mothers participated in the study. The mean age of mothers being (40.6yrs)SD (1.08). A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants. Three hypotheses were formulated and tested using multiple regression and one way ANOVA.
Results revealed that the components of occupational stress; workload, interpersonal problems, temporal problems, reward system, leadership problems and inadequate working facilities jointly accounted for 18% of the variance of quality of parent-child relationship (R= .43, R² = .18, F =3.98; p<.01). The analysis further revealed that workload (β=
.91, t = 2.59, p>.01) have the highest independent influence on quality of parent-child relationship among multiparous mothers with a beta value of .91. The result further showed that there is a significant joint influence of demographic variables on quality of parent-child relationship among multiparous mothers (F=2.49; p<.05), participant’s income (β=.16; t=2.10; p˂.05) and educational qualification (β=.15; t=2.03; p˂.05) had significant independent influences on quality of parent-child relationship among multiparous mothers. High income earning mothers who earn above N51,000 scored significantly higher on the quality of parent-child relationship (F=2.96; p˂.05) which shows that high income earning parents have a higher quality parent-child interaction.
The study concludes that occupational stress contributes significantly to the quality of parent-child relationship among
multiparous mothers, with workload having an individual influence on quality of parent-child relationship