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Associations Among Parental Stress, Child Competence, and School-Readiness: Findings from the PACE Study

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Abstract

Perceived parental stress has been consistently shown to negatively impact child functioning and ability to cope with stressful situations. Utilizing data from the parenting our children to excellence program, the current study examined the relationships among perceived parenting stress, coping competence, and school readiness in a sample of African American and Caucasian parents of preschool children (age 3–6) considered at high risk for child physical abuse. We hypothesized that child competence would mediate the relation between perceived parental stress and children’s school readiness. We tested a longitudinal latent variable model and found that parent-reported (but not teacher-reported) child competence mediated the relation between perceived parental stress and school readiness, controlling for family income, parent’s education level, and child’s sex. These results suggest that parents’ perceived stress plays a role in both how they view their children’s competence and how children perform academically.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant R49/CCR 522339 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the second author. The study’s findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA

    Kathryn Soltis, Tatiana M. Davidson & Angela Moreland

  2. Deparment of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Julia Felton

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Jean E. Dumas

Authors
  1. Kathryn Soltis
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  2. Tatiana M. Davidson
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  3. Angela Moreland
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  4. Julia Felton
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  5. Jean E. Dumas
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Correspondence to Kathryn Soltis.

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Soltis, K., Davidson, T.M., Moreland, A. et al. Associations Among Parental Stress, Child Competence, and School-Readiness: Findings from the PACE Study. J Child Fam Stud 24, 649–657 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-013-9875-2

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