Abstract
This paper focuses on the relationship between the mothers' child-care attitudes and their needs while parenting, for improvement of supporting child-care at the early stage after giving child. We conducted a questionnaire survey on 152 mothers in Tokyo metropolitan area who had baby younger than three months old. 86 mothers were primiparous and 66 were multiparous. And the questionnaire contains 25 items about the attitudes and 25 about the needs. All questions require answering with 5-level interval scales. In this study, the exploratory factor analysis reveals 5 factors from the items of the attitudes and 6 from those of the needs. Then t-test for comparing the factor scores of the primiparous with those of the multiparous shows that the primiparous become more nervous and more compulsive than the multiparous, and the primiparous tend to want social friendships and to rely on outside information from such human relations which helps them care baby. Furthermore the multiple regression analysis is conducted on both data of the primiparous and of the multiparous, for analyzing the relationship between the attitudes and the needs. The outstanding result from the analysis shows that the primiparous' "desires for disembarrassment from child care" is explained with positive aspects of child-care, but that of the multiparous is explained with negative aspects. Also the multiparous' search for self- fulfillment is related with their positive attitude for child-care.
