Comparing Parenting Styles of Mothers of Children with Obsessive-Compulsive and Phobic Disorders and Mothers of Normal Children

Cold relationships, parental neglect, and defective parenting practices set the grounds for child psychiatric disorders in adulthood that lead to severe child irresponsibility. Phobia is one of the anxiety disorders, and its main feature is the obvious fear of visible and circumscribed objects and situations that damage the person's functions. Obsessions, thoughts, impulses, or mental images are reversible and persistent. They are perceived as disturbing and quickly turn into extreme worries about everyday problems. Numerous factors contribute to the etiology of psychiatric disorders. In this regard, environmental factors, including parental parenting styles, play an essential role in creating these disorders and their different emotions. Therefore, it seems necessary to study mothers' parenting styles who have children with phobia. This study aimed to compare mothers' parenting styles of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobia with mothers of normal children.

This research was a causal-comparative study. The statistical population included all mothers of children with obsessive-compulsive, phobic, and normal children living in Qom City, Iran, in 2013. The study sample included 40 mothers of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder, 40 mothers of children with phobia, and 40 mothers of the normal children in the control group. The sampling method of the control group was randomized so that twice the final number of samples was selected. After the screening, the samples were selected randomly. The available sample method was used to select the samples with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The inclusion criteria for children included girls and boys aged 8 to 12 years with an average IQ or above. Also, their mothers should have at least a diploma without chronic psychiatric disorders such as psychosis (based on psychiatrist diagnosis) and be able to answer the questionnaire in written form or orally. The exclusion criteria included non-compliance with any inclusion criteria, cancellation or reluctance of mothers to complete the questionnaires, and incomplete completion of research tools. To identify children with symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, self-report questionnaires of Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory–Child Version (OCI-CV) (Foa et al., 2010) and to identify children with phobia, the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) (Connor et al., 2000) were used. Also, the Parenting Style Questionnaire (Baumrind et al., 1971) was used as the research tool. The obtained data were collected, encoded, and entered into SPSS version 16. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation) and graphical analysis. Also, in the inferential statistics section, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), as well as the Chi-square test and Bonferroni post hoc test, were used to examine the differences between groups in terms of dependent variables. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05 or less.

The findings showed that in the uninvolved parenting style, the obsessive-compulsive group was significantly different from the normal group (p=0.024). That is, in this method, the mean scores of the obsessive-compulsive group (mean=17.73, SD=3.98) were significantly higher than the mean scores of the normal group (mean=14.97, SD=4.25). In the authoritarian parenting style, only the phobia group was significantly different from the normal group (p=0.004). In this method, the mean scores of the phobia group (mean=16.20, SD=5.41) were higher than the mean scores of the normal group (mean=12.36, SD=4.99). There was no significant difference between the groups in the authoritative parenting style regarding all pairwise comparisons (p>0.05).

According to the study findings, the uninvolved parenting style of mothers can cause obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the authoritarian parenting style can cause phobia disorders in children.