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General Versus Parenting Stress and Chinese Immigrant Preschoolers’ Adjustment: The Mediating Roles of Parenting Practices

Fri, April 9, 12:55 to 1:55pm EDT (12:55 to 1:55pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

Preschoolers’ socio-emotional and behavioral competence is associated with their positive peer and adult relationships (Mendez et al., 2002) and subsequent positive adjustment (Timmermans et al., 2008). Parental stress has been found to contribute to preschoolers’ socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment problems (Anthony et al., 2005; Liu & Wang, 2015). Abidin’s (1992) parenting stress model proposes that parental stress may lead to negative parenting behaviors, which in turn, result in child adjustment problems. However, this mediating process has not received much empirical attention (Huth-Bocks & Hughes, 2008) nor has how specific type of stressors may uniquely contribute to parenting and child adjustment (Sanner & Neece, 2018). Therefore, we focused on general/contextual stress (i.e., stress from a variety of resources including work, marriage, finance, and environmental issues) and parenting stress (i.e., the accessibility and perceived availability of resources for parenting relative to the demands of parenting; Abidin, 1992) and examined their unique associations with parenting practices and subsequent child adjustment. We assessed the mediating roles of parenting warmth and psychological control. Chinese American parents tend to express less parental warmth and more psychologically controlling parenting (PCP) than their European American counterparts due to the Confucian focus on emotional restraint and child compliance (Chao & Aque, 2009; Deater-Deckard et al., 2011).

First-generation Chinese American mothers (N=212, Mage=37.71 years, SD=4.35) of preschoolers (Mage=4.51 years, SD=0.89, 51% boys) reported on their general/contextual stress (DeLongis et al., 1988; α=.95), parenting stress (Crnic & Greenherg, 1990; α=.91), maternal warmth (Robinson et al., 2001; α=.78), and PCP (Olsen et al., 2002; α=.84). Most mothers (93%) had at least a college degree. Teachers reported on children’s socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment problems (Goodman, 1997; α=.81).

Descriptive statistics and correlations are provided in Table 1. Path analyses revealed that maternal general/contextual stress was negatively associated with maternal warmth and positively associated with PCP, and maternal parenting stress was only significantly and positively associated with PCP (Figure 1). PCP, in turn, was negatively associated with children’s socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment problems. Both general/contextual stress (ab=-0.01, SE=0.01, 95% CI [-0.019, -0.001]) and parenting stress (ab=-0.02, SE=0.01, 95% CI [-0.036, -0.001]) had a negative indirect effect on children’s adjustment problems through PCP.

Both general/contextual stress and parenting stress contributed to more PCP, but only general/contextual stress was associated with less maternal warmth, indicating the unique contributions of specific types of stress to specific parenting practices (Bornstein, 2017). Although both types of stress may evoke more controlling practices to obtain child compliance, general/contextual stress may represent broader concerns and exhaust parental resources to a greater extent and negatively influence the emotional climate of warmth (Dix, 1991). Higher PCP was associated with fewer adjustment problems in preschoolers. Although surprising, this finding is consistent with some previous research where PCP was less detrimental in cultures where it fits the collectivistic familial socialization goals (Yu et al., 2019), and proposed to be perceived as less maladaptive and more normative (Fung & Lau, 2012), especially for younger children. Findings are discussed considering the Chinese immigrant context of young children.

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