Parenting Stress and Its Influencing Factors Among Chinese Parents in Parent–Grandparent Co-Parenting Families: A Latent Profile Analysis

Guided by family systems theory and the parenting process model, this study aimed to identify distinct profiles of parenting stress and examine their associations with parental characteristics, social-contextual factors, and child factors. A sample of 303 parents of preschool children (52.5% boys, mean child age = 61.17 months) from six urban kindergartens in southern and northern China participated in this study. Latent profile analysis (LPA) identified four distinct parenting stress profiles: the low parenting stress profile (12.9%), middle parenting stress profile (39.3%), high parenting stress profile (40.6%), and very high parenting stress profile (7.2%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that these profiles were significantly associated with parenting self-efficacy, the parent-grandparent co-parenting relationship, the co-parenting structure, family income, and the child's gender. These findings advance our understanding of the heterogeneity of parenting stress within Chinese parent-grandparent co-parenting families and offer theoretical and practical implications for future research and the development of targeted family support interventions.