Age-related characteristics of emotional attitudes towards children in modern Russian families

The article presents the results of a study of the emotional components of parental attitudes towards children on a Russian sample of 3 309 respondents using the «Child-Parent Emotional Interaction Questionnaire» technique by E.I. Zakharova. Empirical data was collected on the Online Test Pad platform on the Internet from 2019 to the present. The study involved 770 men and 2 539 women aged 18 to 78 years raising one or more children with or without disabilities or «disabled health» status. This made it possible to identify two groups of respondents in the sample: parents of conditionally normotypical children (2 912 people) and parents of children with disabilities or the status of «limited health» (397 people). Next, a mathematical and statistical analysis of the obtained data was carried out in the IBM SPSS Statistics v.20 program using the methods of comparing means using the Student t-test and establishing correlations using the Pearson r test. Statistically significant differences have been identified, allowing us to assert that parents raising children with disabilities or the status of «limited health» are less susceptible to the emotional states of the child, understand the causes of these states less well and are less capable of empathizing with their child than parents of conditionally normotypical children. Also, this group of parents has more pronounced deficit values of emotional acceptance of both their own role as a parent and satisfaction with the emotional background of interaction with the child. Analysis of the distribution within the selected groups according to deficiency and hypertrophy in the severity of the emotional components of the parental attitude showed that in the case of «special» parenting, the probability of ending up in the deficiency pole almost doubles. Comparison of the severity of the emotional components of parental attitudes among respondents in the selected groups changes with the increase in the number of children in the family. Parents of both groups improve their understanding of the causes of the child’s condition, their attitude towards themselves as a parent, and their ability to influence the child’s condition. The search for a correlation between the age of respondents and the emotional components of the parental relationship revealed only one change among parents of a «special» child — the older the parent becomes or is, the more fully he orients and interprets (understands) the feelings and desires of his child. Parents of conditionally normotypical children, as their age increases, become less empathetic to the child’s conditions, the range of their feelings towards the child is reduced, the ability for unconditional acceptance decreases, and the emotional background of interaction with the child is somewhat simplified, which may be explained by the separation process.