The Casual Relationship among the Father’s Participation in Childcare, Job Satisfaction, Parenting Stress, and Marital Satisfaction of Working Mother

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to determine the structural relationship among the father’s participation in childcare, parenting stress, marital satisfaction, and the job satisfaction of working mothers. This study is based on the 2011 Panel Study on Korean Children, a large, population-based study conducted by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education. The participants were 431 working mothers. To ensure the reliability and validity of the questions, descriptive statistics of the frequency, ratio, average, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis were obtained using SPSS 21.0. Exploratory factor, variables correlation, and reliability analysis were also performed. The structural analysis using AMOS 20.0 in the bootstrapping method was conducted to perform a path analysis among the variables and to assess the suitability of the model. A hypothetical model was proposed, which was composed of a father’s participation in childcare as an exogenous variable and parenting stress, marital satisfaction, and job satisfaction of a working mother as the endogenous variables. The results of this study are as follows: First, a father’s participation in childcare and the parenting stress and marital satisfaction of a working mother affect the job satisfaction of the mother. The most influential factor is marital satisfaction. Second, marital satisfaction has mediating effects between the father’s participation in childcare and the parenting stress and job satisfaction of the working mother. Third, parenting stress does not affect job satisfaction Keywords: father's participation in child-care, parenting stress, marital satisfaction, job satisfaction