The Relationship Among Parenting Stress,Parent-Child Communication Quality And Children's Problems

Problems during childhood frequently would persist into the adolescence and adulthood, increasing the risk of academic, behavioural, peer relationships and other mental health disorders. Existing researches reported that internalizing and externalizing problems in childhood were associated with parenting stress and parent-child communication quality.The present study was to examine the characteristics of internalizing and externalizing problems and its relation to parenting stress and parent-child communication quality.441 primary school children and their parents and head teachers who were recruited from one primary school in Jinan, Shandong Province participated in this study and finished the Youth Self-Report, Parent-Adolescent Communication scale, Parenting Stress Index/Short Form and the Clustering Child Behaviour Checklist, respectively. SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 17.0 were used to manage and analyze the data. The main conclusions of the study were as follows:(1) Boys reported higher level of externalizing problems than girls. Children in Grade 3 reported the most externalizing problems and children in Grade 6 reported the least internalizing problems.(2) Maternal parenting stress and father-child communication quality had positive and negative correlation significantly with child's internalizing problems, separately. And mother-child communication quality was significantly negatively correlated with parenting stress and internalizing problems, respectively.(3) Mother-child communication quality could fully mediate the relationship between parenting stress and internalizing problems.The above results were based on the data colleted from children and their parents and teachers, which could be useful to avoid the shared method variance. This study provided a fact to research children's internalizing and externalizing problems and their relation to parenting stress and parent-child communication quality and put forward education suggestions for children's mental health practice and intervention.