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. 2025 Apr 15;15(4):533.
doi: 10.3390/bs15040533.

Parenting Stress and Its Influencing Factors Among Chinese Parents in Parent-Grandparent Co-Parenting Families: A Latent Profile Analysis

Tongyao Wang  1 , Hongyan Cheng  1
Affiliations

Parenting Stress and Its Influencing Factors Among Chinese Parents in Parent-Grandparent Co-Parenting Families: A Latent Profile Analysis

Tongyao Wang et al. Behav Sci (Basel). .

Abstract

Guided by family systems theory and the parenting process model, this study aimed to identify distinct profiles of parenting stress and examine their associations with parental characteristics, social-contextual factors, and child factors. A sample of 303 parents of preschool children (52.5% boys, mean child age = 61.17 months) from six urban kindergartens in southern and northern China participated in this study. Latent profile analysis (LPA) identified four distinct parenting stress profiles: the low parenting stress profile (12.9%), middle parenting stress profile (39.3%), high parenting stress profile (40.6%), and very high parenting stress profile (7.2%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that these profiles were significantly associated with parenting self-efficacy, the parent-grandparent co-parenting relationship, the co-parenting structure, family income, and the child's gender. These findings advance our understanding of the heterogeneity of parenting stress within Chinese parent-grandparent co-parenting families and offer theoretical and practical implications for future research and the development of targeted family support interventions.

Keywords: latent profile analysis; parenting stress; parent–grandparent co-parenting; preschool children.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A process model of the determinants of parenting.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The four profiles of the best-fitting solution.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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