Parental Warmth, Family Resilience and Psychological Distress Among Chinese Parent-Child Dyads: An Actor-Partner Interdependence Mediation Model

Background and Purpose: Psychological distress is a common concern among both children and parents regarding their psychological well-being. Epidemiological research has identified a number of protective factors at the family level, such as parental warmth and family resilience. However, little research has explored family-level factors among parent-child dyads from an interdependency perspective. Based on interdependence theory, this study aimed to explore the dyadic interactions of perceived parental warmth, family resilience, and psychological distress between parent and child dyads. Specifically, this study estimated how one’s psychological distress is linked to their own (actor effects) perception of parental warmth through family resilience, and to their partners’ (partner effects) perceived parental warmth through partner's family resilience. In addition, potential parental gender differences were also investigated between the father-child and mother-child dyads.

Methods: This cross-sectional study involved adolescent-parent dyads from the Greater Bay Area of China. Participants were 1339 adolescent-parent dyads (including 555 father-child dyads, and 784 mother-child dyads) with children aged 11 to 16 years old (M = 13.13, SD = 0.60). Parental warmth and family resilience were assessed by Chinese Family Resilience Scale (C-FRS), and the Subscale of Parental Warmth from the Shortened Egna Minnen Betraffande Uppfostran (s-EMBU). Psychological distress of adolescents and parents was measured by the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales for Youth (DASS-Y) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Preliminary analyses, including descriptive statistics for all variables, missing value imputation, and paired t-tests, were completed via SPSS (v. 26.0). Primary analyses were conducted using the actor-partner interdependence mediation model and structural equation modeling techniques in Mplus (v. 8.3).

Results: Preliminary analyses revealed that parents had a higher perception of parental warmth and family resilience compared to children. Primary results showed that family resilience mediates the actor effects of perceived parental warmth on psychological distress among both parties in father-child dyads while only among children in mother-child dyads. Specifically, perceived parental warmth was positively related to their family resilience, which was negatively associated with psychological distress. Another important finding was the identification of a specific indirect effect, termed the partner-actor indirect effect, observed in both members of father-child dyads. This effect indicates that an individual's perceived parental warmth can predict the psychological distress of their partner through the partner's family resilience. Meanwhile, this indirect effect was observed only from mother to child among mother-child dyads. In addition, parental gender differences were found between father-child dyads and mother-child dyads.

Conclusions and Implications: Higher perceived parental warmth can decrease one’s psychological distress through one’s own family resilience among both parties in father-child dyads and among children in mother-child dyads. Furthermore, perceived parental warmth by parents can alleviate children's psychological distress through the children's family resilience. In addition, perceived parental warmth by the child predicted the father's psychological distress through the father's family resilience. Practitioners working with families could identify vulnerable adolescents with poorer parental warmth and family resilience and make focused interventions at the family level.