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The association between parenting stress and child externalizing behavior, and the mediating role of parenting, has yielded inconsistent findings; however, the literature has typically been cross-sectional or unidirectional. In the current study, the authors examined the longitudinal transactions among parenting stress, perceived negative parental reactions, and child externalizing at 4, 5, 7, and 10 years old. Models examining parent effects (parenting stress to child behavior), child effects (externalizing to parental reactions and stress), indirect effects of parental reactions, and the transactional associations among all variables were compared. The transactional model best fit the data, and longitudinal reciprocal effects emerged between parenting stress and externalizing behavior. The mediating role of parental reactions was not supported; however, indirect effects suggest that parenting stress both is affected by and affects parent and child behavior. The complex associations among parent and child variables indicate the importance of interventions to improve the parent-child relationship and reducing parenting stress.
Key Words: children and child development, parent-child relationships, parenting, stress.
Parenting has been described as one of the most rewarding tasks of adulthood. Nevertheless, parenting is also challenging, and some parents feel that the demands of raising their children exceed available resources. The aversive psychological reaction resulting from a mismatch between perceived parenting demands and available parenting resources has been termed parenting stress (Deater-Deckard, 1998). Parenting stress has been linked with a number of maladaptive child outcomes, either directly (Crnic, Gaze, & Hoffman, 2005; Crnic & Greenberg, 1990) or indirectly via negative parenting (Abidin, 1986; Deater-Deckard & Scarr, 1996).
Although much has been learned about parenting stress and child behavior, several key issues are still unresolved. Theories of parenting stress and also key developmental and family theories-including transactional theoretical frameworks (Eyberg, Schuhmann, & Rey, 1998; Sameroff, 1975) and dynamic systems approaches (Granic & Patterson, 2006)- emphasize that parenting stress and child outcomes likely have reciprocal links over time. Yet, the most robust evidence on associations between parenting stress and child behavior comes from work predicting child externalizing behavior (Baker et al., 2003; Crnic et al., 2005; Neece, Green, & Baker, 2012). The literature examining the opposite direction of effects from child behavior to parenting stress (e.g., Scarr, 1992) is comparatively small. Furthermore, the role of key potential mediators in associations between...