Ethnic Differences in Home-Related Maternal Stress: Muslim and Jewish Mothers

Saadi Diana, Tirosh Emanuel, Agay-Shay Keren and Schnell Izhak
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Saadi Diana: Porter School of the Environmental and Earth Sciences, the Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
Tirosh Emanuel: Bnei Zion Medical Center, the Rappaport Family Faculty of Medicine, (emeritus), The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 23774, Israel
Agay-Shay Keren: Faculty of Medicine in the Galilee, Bar Ilan University, Safed 5290002, Israel
Schnell Izhak: Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 66978, Israel

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 22, 1-13

Abstract: Parental stresses are normal responses to raising children. They are affected by stresses parents and children accumulate and bring to their interrelations. Background factors like economic difficulties or the relations between the parents may affect parental stresses as well as demographic and environmental factors like noise and access to urban parks. Most studies on parental stress are based on a verified psychological questionnaire. We suggest using frequency domain heart rate variability index (HRV) to measure parental stress enabling, by thus, the measurement of physiological aspects of stress and risk to health. Parental stress is measured as the difference between HRV accumulated at home while staying with the children and without the husband and HRV measured in the neighborhood while staying without the children and the husband. We use the index to compare differences among Muslim and Jewish mothers in exposure to maternal stress at their homes and to expose the factors that predict differences in maternal stress. We found that Muslim mothers suffer from home-related maternal stress while Jewish mother do not. Number of children and ethnically related environmental aspects predict differences in maternal stress between Muslim and Jewish mothers. Muslims’ lower access to parks stems from lack of home garden and parks in their neighborhoods in the Arab towns but mainly by restrictions on Muslim mothers’ freedom of movement to parks. Despite differences in levels of noise at home and in the status of the mother in the household, these factors did not predict differences in maternal stress. Instead, the study highlights the crucial role of greenery and freedom of movement to parks in moderating home-related maternal stress.

Keywords: parental stress; maternal stress; heart rate variability as an index of parental stress; socio-economic; demographic; environmental and gender factors associated with maternal stress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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