COVID-19 Preventive Practices, Parent–Child Conflict, and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese Adolescents

The COVID-19 pandemic affected adolescent mental health. However, the concurrent associations among adolescents’ preventive practices, parent–child conflict, and depressive symptoms during the initial lockdown remain unclear. This cross-sectional study included 2558 adolescents (48.75% girls; M age = 13.06 years) from Zhengzhou, China, of whom 2543 were included in the analytic sample after cases missing age or class identifiers were excluded. All focal constructs were assessed once by adolescent self-report. Latent moderated mediation analyses showed that preventive practices were directly and negatively associated with depressive symptoms. A significant indirect association was observed through parent–child conflict such that greater engagement in preventive practices co-occurred with less parent–child conflict and fewer depressive symptoms. The negative direct association between preventive practices and depressive symptoms was stronger for boys, whereas the positive association between parent–child conflict and depressive symptoms was stronger for girls. However, these interaction terms added only ΔR2 = 0.003 and 0.004 in observed-score sensitivity models and were not statistically significant in the subsample sensitivity analysis. These findings identify parent–child conflict as a concurrent correlate of the association between preventive practices and depressive symptoms during the pandemic.