Parenting Stress and Child Anxiety: Exploring Potential Moderators

Parenting stress, or stress that arises from the demands of parenting, has been linked with children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Rodriguez, 2011; Tsotsi et al., 2019). Of these behaviors, less is known about its unique relation to anxiety, a prevalent and significant disorder for many children. The present study aims to address this gap by examining the relation between parenting stress and childhood anxiety while also testing whether parental psychological distress or child resilience would emerge as significant moderators. Parenting stress was found to positively predict children’s anxiety, such that as parenting stress increases, so does child anxiety. However, neither parental psychological distress nor child resilience emerged as significant moderators of this relation. Future studies should explore other potential variables that could act as risk or resilience factors to further our understanding of factors that may exacerbate or protect against increased child anxiety due to parenting stress.