Association between parenting efficacy and parent–child relationships for parents with one or two preschool children

this study utilized data from one-child and two-child family with children aged from 3-6 years old in Shanghai, China to (a) demonstrate the status of parenting self-efficacy and parent-child relationship in current Chinese families, (b) examine whether there exist a heterogeneity of parenting self-efficacy and how it related to children number and (c) explore the relationship between parenting self-efficacy and parent-child relationship. So as to provide some guidance for children's care services and nursing work. This was a quantitative cross-sectional study. 378 one-child parents and 372 two-child parents in Shanghai, China, were tested separately with SEPTI-TS and PCRS in June 2021 with the repose rate of 94% to assess their parenting self-efficacy and parent-child relationship. This study analyzed parenting self-efficacy based on latent profile analysis and classified the types and distribution of parenting self-efficacy. The difference of parenting self-efficacy, latent type’s score, and relevance to the parent-child relationship between one- and two-child parents were explored by making an independent sample t-test, variance analysis, and logistic regression. Parenting self-efficacy of both one-child and two-child parents could be divided into three latent types: low, medium, and high efficacy (entropy=0.839/0.840, LMRT= 223.222/257.495). Higher the score of the parent-child relationship, more likely the parents were to be classified as medium or high self-efficacy types of parents (OR=46.924/37.721). One-child parents accounted for a higher proportion among high-efficacy types (37.5% v.s. 31.0%). Parenting self-efficacy of one-child parents was significantly higher than that of two-child parents (4.53 > 4.45, p<0.05). The second child makes parenting self-efficacy and distribution of latent types different between one- and two-child parents. The decreasing of efficacy among two-child parents should be paid attention to. Promoting parenting self-efficacy from a perspective of the parent-child relationship could be a good way. Customized intervention strategies were encouraged given the heterogeneous profile.