Parental Anxiety About Children’s Education: Construct Clarification and Scale Development

Parents’ anxiety about their children’s education has been common in recent years and has a negative effect on children. This study aimed to clarify this construct and develop the Parental Anxiety about Children’s Education Scale (PACES) to lay a foundation for future research. In Study 1, we developed a scale based on 465 parents that included 20 items and four dimensions of anxiety in relation to children’s academic performance, family educational resources, the quality of school education, and the educational macroenvironment. In Study 2, we used data from 4566 parents to test the reliability and validity of the final scale via item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, consistency reliability, measurement invariance, and validity evidence on the basis of relations. We concluded that the scale is a promising new measure for assessing parental anxiety about children’s education for parents of both primary and secondary school students.