The Exploration of Maternal Self-Efficacy: The Role of Childhood Traumas, Adult Attachment and Cognitive Flexibility

Abstract

Maternal self-efficacy is a crucial component of effective parenting. It enhances the mother's experience and has wide-reaching effects on the child's development, well-being, mother-child relationship, and overall family dynamics. Yet, the elements constituting maternal efficacy are poorly understood because of their complexity. Using four steps of hierarchical regression analysis within the parental self-efficacy theory framework, this study explored the predictive power of demographics, childhood trauma, adult attachment, and cognitive flexibility in understanding maternal self-efficacy. The study included 386 mothers with children aged 0–6 years who reside in Turkey. The findings showed that the overall model explained an 18% variation in maternal self-efficacy scores. Among the control variables, the mother's age displayed robustness, as it remained unaffected by the studied variables. At the same time, education and employment status do not have significant predictive power over maternal self-efficacy. The results of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that childhood trauma and adult attachment are predictors of maternal self-efficacy. However, their significance disappeared in the presence of cognitive flexibility. This finding suggests that, like cognitive flexibility, various contextual and personal factors may alleviate the negative impact of childhood traumas and insecure attachments. The findings might help design policies, interventions, and programs to enhance parental self-efficacy, which leads to improved parenting practices and better parent-child relationships and ultimately contributes to positive child outcomes.