**2. Literature review**

Even though creativity studies have been oriented toward the creative process and understanding its dynamic and evolving momentum [12], children's everyday experiences with their significant others may influence their motivation, perseverance, competence, and so on, required for the fine elements in children's thinking [13]. Having said that, the casual relationship between mother's personality and children's creativity may be more complicated than one might assume. For example, it may be possible, depending on the conditions, that children's creativity has some effects on parent's personality, and there may be other factors such as socio-economic status which affect children's creativity [14, 15].

### **2.1 Maternal personality and children's creativity in Chinese societies**

Studies of the relationship between parents' personalities and children's creativity have conflicting results. On the one hand, studies showed mothers have an effect on children's creativity. Kwaśniewska and Lebuda [16] conducted 27 qualitative interviews with mothers and found that creative mothers foster a climate conducive to children's creativity. Kwaśniewska et al. [2]'s study showed that mothers who possess openness and extraversion traits more may show higher creative potential, while highly neuroticism parents may have less creative potential. And mothers with openness traits have a positive attitude to creativity, as well as are willing to provide the "climate" for creativity in a parent-child relationship. Since mothers are usually the primary caregivers who have been shown to play a key role in children's development, more studies are needed to examine the parentchild relationship in terms of mother's personality and children's, especially young children, creativity performance as it will shed light on creativity development in the early years, an issue that has drawn people's attention in recent years. On the other hand, Fu et al. [17]'s research showed that there was no indication of any significant relationship between maternal personality and preschoolers' creativity. The conflicting results may be due to the limitation of samples, or the measurements applied to measuring creative abilities.

From above, the relationship between maternal personality and children's creativity could be further discussed. Furthermore, considering the cultural factor, assessment of Chinese personality indicated that neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness factors were jointly listed in the widely used Big Five inventory, but openness factor was not [18]. The openness factor was more identifiable in individualist cultures but was negatively correlated with collectivism [19]. Chinese society is more inclined to collectivism. However, previous studies showed that the openness factor was highly correlated to creativity [20]. Even the compatibility between cultural personality and creative personality in China was discussed (e.g., [21, 22]), the impacts of mother's personality on children's creativity require further investigations.

More importantly, it may be difficult to measure children's creativity as young children's manifestations of creativity are subtle and nonverbal. Therefore, the Thinking

#### *Indirect Effects of Parenting Style on the Relationship between Maternal Personality… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102378*

Creatively in Action and Movement (TCAM) measure [23], which takes around 30 minutes for each child, is used in this study. Details will be given in the Section 3. This paper aims at finding the direct and indirect effects of maternal personality on children's creativity. For indirect effects, we conjecture that parenting style may be one of the possible mediators. So, we shall look at previous studies on the relationship between parental personality and parenting style.

### **2.2 Parental personality and parenting style**

Parents play an important role in children's development [24, 25]. Clark et al. [26] and van Aken et al. [27] study showed that parents' personality relates to their parenting behaviors, and in turn children's behaviors generally. Smith et al. [28] found that mothers with higher levels of agreeableness showed more warmth and support toward their children. Mothers with higher extraversion showed more maternal warmth and, thus, were more likely to support their children's autonomy, but such mothers also exercised higher power assertion over their children [28, 29]. Furthermore, mothers with high conscientiousness levels displayed support toward their children's autonomy, yet these mothers were more controlling and restrictive; but at the same time, less forcefully disciplinarian [26, 30]. Such mothers provided more rational, structured, and less forceful parenting to their children [30]. Coplan et al. [31] concluded that maternal neuroticism may lead to an overprotective parenting style, while higher agreeableness in mothers represented a low, harsh parenting style.

There are possible relationships between maternal personality and maternal parenting style. According to Baumrind [32] research on parenting authority, there were three categories: authoritarian (high in control and maturity demands, low in responsiveness and communication), authoritative (high in control, maturity demands, responsiveness, and communication), and permissive (high in communication and responsiveness, but low in control and maturity demands). In China, Xu et al. [33]'s research showed that Chinese mothers prefer authoritarian and authoritative parenting. Results showed that authoritative parenting could increase children's creativity while authoritarian parenting plays a negative role in children's creativity in high-school students [34]. The relationship between parenting style and children's creativity is worth studying, given the importance of the early years which are known to set the foundation for later development.

#### **2.3 Parenting style and creativity**

Maternal parenting style is one of the factors that influence children's development [35]. Feldman and Klein [36] found that mothers who give warm and sensitive feedback to their children's needs may lead to positive and effective interactions between mother and child. Also, children who accept their parents' advice may be more willing to correct misbehavior [37]. In contrast, negative interactions between parents and children, or even worse, punishment, may intensify children's misbehavior [38, 39]. Few studies have focused on the relationship between parenting and creativity, but some are described as follows.

Fan and Zhang [40] found that perceived parental involvement is positively related to a creativity-generating thinking style. Siegelman [7] found that students who perceive lower parental attention show higher creative potential than those who perceive parental love, and we will return to this with our results in the Section 5. Both studies focused on university students and not on young children. Fearon et al. [13]

investigated the inter-relationship among parents' creativity, parenting styles, and children's creativity for primary school students, and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) were used. Results showed that there were significant effects of parents' creativity and parenting styles on children's creativity. In this study, the importance of maternal personality in affecting young children's creativity, instead of children's creativity level or performance, is emphasized.

### **2.4 Research objectives**

Some previous studies have shown the relationships between two variables, namely parents' personality and parenting style, or between parenting style and children's creativity for primary school students. Meanwhile, the cultural issues that were highlighted in previous studies are still contested. This study, therefore, investigates the direct and indirect effects of maternal personality on 4- to 8-year-old children's creativity under the Chinese context. For indirect effects, parenting style is treated as a mediator. And before we do that, we explore the interrelationships among maternal personality, maternal parenting style, and children's creativity.
