Parental stress and child mental health: a network analysis of Romanian parents.

Parental stress is related to child mental health problems, with numerous evidence indicating that it is an important predictor of parenting and parent-child relationship. New approaches to psychopathology could be particularly informative for clinical research, however, there is limited research that employs network analysis with parents. Network analysis could contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between child mental health problems and parental stress by highlighting the most central nodes and how the two constructs influence each other. The scope of the study was to identify potential new intervention targets to reduce the mental health problems of children and prevent contagion between parent stress and child psychopathology. Furthermore, we also sought to test whether the dynamic between parental stress and child psychopathology differs across the level of parent stress and child total difficulties. In this endeavor, we had three main directions. First, we estimated a network at the level of child mental health problems and identified the most central nodes. Second, we mapped the main paths through which parent stress and child mental health problems communicate with each other. Third, we investigated the network invariance across the level of parent stress (high vs moderate) and child mental health problems (low vs. high total difficulties). Participants ( Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03520-1.