Emotional neglect among kindergarten children in a county of Henan Province / 中国学校卫生

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To explore the incidence and influencing factors of child emotional neglect, and to provide evidence for the relevant departments to prevent child emotional neglect.@*Methods@#Stratified random cluster sampling method was used to select 1 354 parents from a county of Henan Province. Anonymous questionnaire survey was conducted among them to investigate child emotional neglect, logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the influencing factors of emotional neglect.@*Results@#The total incidence of child emotional neglect was 15.7%, and the rate of boys and girls was 14.7% and 16.8%, respectively, that of fathers and mothers was 18.3% and 15.1%, respectively. There were no statistically significant differences in rates between fathers and mothers’ emotional neglect behaviors, neither between boys and girls (χ2=1.18，3.14, P>0.05).90.2% parents could often/always console children when they were hurt or feared. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that risk factors of high emotional neglect incidence included living in rural areas, poorer family economic status, parents with lower social support and childhood neglect experience, biological parents are not married(OR=2.71, 2.56, 2.64, 2.66, 4.11, 1.76, P<0.05).@*Conclusion@#Parents’ emotional neglect of kindergarten children existed in the research area, attention should be paid to the emotional neglect of parents from rural areas, and parental education activities should be carried out to enhance parents’ parenting skills.