Investigation of the relationship between the concerns of children in preschool education and their parents' concerns

Anxiety arises as a state of concern with uncertain origin and persisting for a certain period of time. Anxiety can be defined as the state of emotion that people often experience at different levels in their daily lives. Both pre-school children and their parents have different levels of anxiety at different times. Numerous studies have been conducted on anxiety. However, it is seen that there are limited number of studies in which parental anxiety and child anxiety are studied together. This research is important in terms of revealing the relationship between the concerns of their children and parents' concerns and the various variables that affect them. The aim of this study is to determine whether the anxiety of the children and their parents attending preschool education differ according to various demographic characteristics and to determine whether there is a relationship between the concerns of the children and their parents. The study group of the research is consisted of 468 children in preschool and their parents. As a data collection tool in the research; child and parent information forms, Preschool Anxiety Scale and Adult Separation Anxiety Questionnaire were used. Since the data is not normally distributed; from the non-parametric tests, Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis H and Spaerman RHO were used. According to the findings; the anxiety level of girls is significantly higher than that of boys. In addition, it has been seen that as the duration of pre-school education of children increased, anxiety levels decreased and parents with higher education level raised less anxious children. In the findings regarding the anxiety levels of the parents; it has been that mothers were more anxious than fathers, the level of anxiety of the parents with high education and income is low and a positive and significant relationship is found between parental anxiety and the anxiety of their children. Key Words: Children anxiety, parental anxiety, pre-school