Association of parental verbal responsivity with reduced mental health problems in preschool-aged children: a cross-sectional study of 21,366 dyads in western China

In this large-scale study, a weak association was found between verbal interaction frequency and child mental health, explaining less than 1% of outcome variance. This highlights the limitation of measuring only interaction frequency and underscores the need for future research to incorporate multi-informant and observational methods to better understand pathways to child mental health.