Abstract
The study focused on verifying the relationship between the ability to meet parental goals, parental difficulty, the child's representation in the parent's mind, and aggressive directiveness. The project refers to Tomaszewski’s theory of action as well as to Gurycka's theory of parental mistakes, in which the inability to achieve parental goals is treated as the main cause of experienced parental difficulties. The analyses were performed on data collected from 158 mothers of preschool children. The analyses were performed using structural equations as well as associative algorithms and artificial intelligence algorithms: cluster analysis and artificial neural networks. The structural model revealed strong relations between variables. The cluster analysis revealed three characteristic profiles in the maternal population that are distinguished by the level of analyzed variables. The artificial neural network revealed that, on the basis of the variables included in the model, the parents’ results in aggressive directiveness can be predicted.