Examination of the relationship between perspective taking levels of preschool students aged 4- 5 years and maternal attitudes

Preschool period (between 0-6 ages) is considerably important in terms of physical, cognitive, social and emotional developments during childhood. Children start to develop a perspective of others and acquire the ability to establish empathy in this critical period. In addition to this, parental attitudes have profound effects on behavioral and personal developments of children. That being the case, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between 4-5-aged pre-school children's perspective-taking developments and maternal attitudes. The study group was composed of 200 preschool children from three different independent public nursery schools in the Nilüfer and Osmangazi districts of Bursa and their mothers. In the study, the preschool children were administered "The Perspective-Taking Test for Children" developed by Aslan and Köksal Akyol (2016) via face-to-face interviews. Moreover, their mothers were administered the Personal Information Form and the "Parenting Styles and Dimensions Scale" adapted by Kapci and Demirci (2009) into Turkish and tested for reliability and validity with the aim of measuring the attitudes of parents with children aged 2- 13 years. The study was carried out in the quantitative design and the data was analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 22 package program. The differences between groups were analyzed via Man Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis–H tests. As a result of the study, no statistically significant difference was found between the perspective-taking levels of the preschool children aged 4-5 years and the maternal attitudes. Although it was not statistically significant, it was found that the perspective-taking sub-dimension scores of the 5-year-old children were higher than those of 4-year-old children. It was also found, though not statistically significant again, that the cognitive and emotional perspective-taking levels of the children with democratic families were higher. When it was evaluated according to the variable of gender, it was found that, though no statistically significant again, while the boys had higher perceptive and cognitive perspective taking scores, the girls had higher emotional perspective taking scores. Keywords: Preschool Education, Perspective taking skills, Maternal Attitudes