Perceived Social Support and Parenting Confidence among the Mothers at Selected Immunization Site of Banepa Municipality

Abstract

Background
A mother’s ability to care for her child and handle the demands of parenthood depends a lot on her confidence as a parent. The overall well-being and parenting experience are influenced by the support gets from friends, family, and the community. However, the direct connection between parenting confidence and perceived social support hasn’t been studied much. This study aimed to explore the relationship between mothers’ perceived social support and their confidence in parenting.
Methods
A cross-sectional research design was used to study 106 mothers of infants aged 0-12 months through face-to-face interviews by using convenience sampling technique. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 16.0), and the correlation coefficient and chi-square test were applied to assess the relationships and associations between the dependent and independent variables.
Results
Out of 106 respondents, majority (82.1%) had low level; whereas only (17.9 %) had high level of parenting confidence. Likewise, most of the respondents (87.7%) had a high level of perceived social support. There is no statistically significant association between age, ethnicity, educational level, occupation and age of infant with level of parenting confidence. There is a moderate, positive, and statistically significant relationship between parenting confidence and perceived social support, as the p-value was less than 0.001.
Conclusions
The study found that most respondents had low parenting confidence but high perceived social support. Parenting confidence showed no significant association with age, ethnicity, education, occupation, or infant age; however, it had a moderate, statistically significant positive correlation with perceived social support.