Comparative analysis of the self-esteem and child rearing attitudes of incarcerated and non-incarcerated mothers who have 2-6 years old children

The main goal of this study is to comparatively analyze the self-esteem and child rearing attitudes between incarcerated and non-incarcerated mothers who have 2 to 6 years old kids. In order to describe the situation that existed during this study and to evaluate any correlation that may exist between variables, relational screening model which is one of the general screening models has been used. The sample set of 301 mothers used for this study consists of 95 incarcerated mothers with 2-6 years old kids staying in Ankara Women, Aksaray and Konya E-type Prisons and 206 non-incarcerated mothers living in Karatay, Selcuklu and Meram municipalities of the city of Konya. The data of this research was collected between February 2013 and April 2013. In this research, to measure the self-esteem of the mothers Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale is used. To evaluate the child rearing attitudes of mothers while raising their 2-6 years old kids, Parental Attitude Scale developed by Karabulut Demir and Sendil (2008) is used. In addition, the demographic information about the mothers who participated in this study is collected by the researcher using a personal information form developed by the author. For incarcerated mothers, the results of this study obtained after statistical analysis have shown weak positive correlation of self-esteem with authoritative behavior, medium negative correlation with authoritarian behavior, weak negative correlation with permissive behavior and no correlation with over-protective behavior. Analyzing the relationship between self-esteem and child rearing attitudes of the mothers who are not incarcerated and used for comparison, we observed significant differences in the same relationship for incarcerated mothers. For the mothers used for comparison, there exists a weak negative correlation of self-esteem with authoritarian behavior and no significant correlation with authoritative, over-protective and permissive behavior. Furthermore, meaningful statistical differences were found between self-esteem and child rearing attitudes of both groups of mothers. These differences sometimes are more favorable for incarcerated mothers and at other times more favorable for non-incarcerated mothers.