Are Mindful Parents More Authoritative and Less Authoritarian? An Analysis of Clinic-Referred Mothers

Forty clinic-referred mothers completed questionnaires describing their children’s problems, the mothers’ parenting styles, and their everyday mindfulness. Psychometric analyses of the questionnaires showed mother reports to be internally consistent, except for one of the parenting style scales (i.e., permissive style). We dropped the scale and analyzed intercorrelations between the remaining two scales, the mindfulness measure and the child problem measure. Results showed the authoritative and authoritarian scales were not correlated, and each scale covaried with measures of mindfulness and child problems. Regression analyses revealed two pathways between mothers’ mindfulness and child problems. Both pathways showed parenting styles to mediate the connections between mothers’ mindfulness and their perceptions of child problems. We speculated on the nature of the mediating process.