Parental Stress and Coping with it in Mothers and Fathers of Teenagers

The study is aimed to investigate parental stress and coping in parents of adolescents and to investigate gender differences by comparing parental stress and coping strategies among male and female parents. The need to research parental stress in parents of adolescents is due to the weak knowledge of parental stress in parents of norm-typical adolescents in Russian studies and empirical evidence of the negative effects of parental stress on mental and physical health for parents and their children. The empirical study involved 102 respondents, parents of adolescents, among them 51 men and 51 women. Respondents aged between 32 and 48 years ( M = 39,62, SD = 4,41). Respondents completed Parental Stress Scale and Coping Strategies Inventory. Data were processed using the Mann - Whitney U -test and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. It was found that parental stress in women raising adolescents is significantly higher than in men. Women are less satisfied with their parental role, they tend to feel loss of control because of parental duties and appreciate their parental investment higher than men. Women tend to use such coping strategies as accepting responsibility, confrontational coping, distancing and escape-avoidance. Parental stress has positive correlation with such strategies as confrontation, distancing and escape-avoidance. Women having parental stress are not inclined to seek social support. The results of the study are of practical importance, allowing to clarify the possible risk group for parental stress and making it possible to create measures to prevent parental stress in parents of adolescents.