Social Support and Parental Stress Among First-time Mother

Abstract

Background: Being a mother is difficult because caring for the child is one of her responsibilities. When caring for children, mothers continue to do household chores in daily activities. Suppose the mother needs social support from people around her while carrying out her responsibilities. In that case, the mother will experience parental stress because she feels unloved and valued, so she cannot carry out her duties. The study aims: to find out the relationship between social support and parental stress in first-time mothers. Method: This research is a quantitative study with a correlational design and using a non-probability sampling technique. The study involved 110 first-time mothers aged 20-40. The measuring instruments used are the Social Provisions Scale (SPS) with the total items used in this study were 19 items (α = 0.98) and Parental Stress Scale (PSS) with total items used in this study were 14 items ( α = 0.913). Result: Spearman correlation test results obtained values ​​of r = -0.474 and p = 0.000 (p<0.05), which showed a significant negative relationship between social support and parental stress in first-time mothers. It means that the higher the social support it has, the lower the parental stress experienced by first-time mothers or vice versa. Conclusion: Most of the participants in this study had high social support and low parental stress.