Parenting is something wonderful since with the birth of a child parents get a new role and learn about new dimensions of life. However, it also represents a lot of stress, responsibility, and decisions. The child is totally dependent on the parents and he needs them to satisfy the most basic needs, give meaning to emotions and regulate them because he is not yet able to do so. Then, with growing up, he becomes more and more independent and goes into the world with some knowledge and patterns of behavior learned first from his parents. It is totally expected that his behavior changes and he has to only know what behavior is right and what behavior is not acceptable for the parents and the society in which he grows up. Here, parents come to a point where they must decide how to teach the child what is right and what is not and how to respond to his behavior and emotions. They need to decide what kind of parents they want to become and at the same time, to process patterns from the past. What kind of patterns they have from the past and how they perceive the world around them and how to deal with stress and emotion depends on what kind of parents they will be, what kind of education they will choose, and how they will discipline the child. Punishment, in physical and psychological form, is still too often a disciplining way.
In the master's thesis, we focused on the stress experienced by parents, the problems with emotional regulation, which can stimulate stress in the parents or contribute to the effective regulation of stress, and disciplining children. The results of the study showed that there are no differences between men and women in experiencing parental stress, problems in emotional regulation and disciplining children. There are some differences in discipline regarding the age of the parents and the age of the child for which the parents filled in the questionnaire.
The results also showed that with increasing problems in emotional regulation, the experience of parental stress is also increasing and that parents who have more problems with emotional regulation really do more and more use punitive discipline. It also is shown that parents who experience more parental stress use more punitive methods of discipline. However, we have not been able to prove that the use of impunity will be reduced.
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