**5. Discussion**

#### **5.1 Maternal personality's influence on children's creativity via parenting style**

This study investigated the effects of maternal personality on children's creativity. Since the subjects were 4- to 8-year-old children, the best way to measure their creativity seems to be assessing actions and movements by TCAM. TCAM is time consuming and what we used here. TCAM measures creativity in terms of fluency, originality, and imagination. Finally, we investigated both direct and indirect effects via parenting.

We did not find any direct effects of maternal personality toward children's creativity, but indirect effects of maternal parenting toward the relationship between their personality and children's creativity. Consistent with Fu et al. [17]'s early study, the relationship between mother's personality and children's creativity is not statistically significant. However, when adding parenting style, a mother's personality does influence children's creativity. The insignificant result may be caused by the distance from mother's self-report personality and their actual personality received by young children. It is not easy to obtain young age children's perceived maternal personality. This is one of our limitations. Another reason may be because another maternal characteristic, which is unknown, contributes more to children's creativity than maternal personality does.

We found a statistically significant indirect effect of neuroticism maternal personality on originality via authoritarian parenting. For the relationship between maternal neuroticism and authoritarian parenting, it is in-line with Coplan et al. [31]

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

who concluded that maternal neuroticism leads to an overprotective parenting style. For the relationship between authoritarian parenting and creativity, our result is in-line with Fearon et al. [13] who showed that authoritarian parenting has negative effects on students' creativity with a sample of Jamaican primary school students. Authoritarian parenting is a constraining parenting style and that may explain the negative effects on children's creativity. In layman's terms, sensitive (neurotic) mothers will probably be more restrictive (authoritarian) of children's behavior, thus possibly reducing children's motivation to try new things, and hence stifling creativity.

This study added three single items in each parenting domain to give additional insight. The single item EIW under the authoritative domain is the only item that explicitly expresses mothers' views on family rules. Results showed that EIW was negatively related to imagination and positively related to maternal openness. So, if mothers with open personalities choose to explain clearly those family rules and restrictions, this may have a negative effect on the imagination. This may be because if parents give clear family rules, it will leave limited room for children's activities. A similar result is found in Kwak et al. [57]'s study, the more maternal attention, the less the child's exploration.

The single item FCG under the authoritarian domain is the only item that emphasizes doing things for the children's good. Although authoritarian and FCG correlated with different creativity constructs, the signs were both negative. Both the whole domain and the single item tend to reduce children's creativity of some sort. Hence, the indirect effects of maternal neuroticism on creativity via FCG may follow a similar path via authoritarian parenting. Our results also showed that maternal agreeableness may lead to lower FCG. Or, more agreeable mothers may tend to exert fewer rules even if it is for the children's good, and then, in turn, this may lead to more positive effects on imagination. These uncovered results were not provided by the authoritarian domain.

The single item NGA, not setting any guidelines at all, under the permissive domain is most interesting. Both maternal conscientiousness and openness were positively related to NGA, but the whole domain of permissive parenting was not related to any of the maternal personalities. Besides, NGA was positively related to all three creativity constructs, but permissive parenting was not related to any of the creativity constructs. Finally, the *b* paths, effects of NGA on fluency and originality, were especially high. This was explained in Kwak et al. [57], whereby mothers who are more conscientious and open to experience may impose fewer restrictions, giving their children more freedom. And this, in turn, will lead to more exploration and higher creativity. This is consistent with Siegelman [7]'s finding that students who perceive lower parent's attention show higher creative potential than those who perceive parental love. To conclude, mothers with conscientious or open personalities may employ the parenting style of NGA, which in turn may lead to higher creativity. This has direct practical implications for nurturing children's creativity.

Further, FCG, EIW, and NGA items represent descending order for "training" under the Chinese context. The study's result shows that FCG and EIW have a negative effect on children's creativity, while NGA has a positive effect. On one hand, even "training" has a positive meaning in Chinese culture, it has a negative effect on children's creativity. On the other hand, NGA contradicted with traditional Chinese parents' preference on educational ideology, but it plays a positive role in children's creativity. Chinese parents' parenting preference on "training" may have negative influence on children's creativity. The contradiction between Chinese parents' preference of parenting and creativity encouragement parenting deserves research effort in the future.
