Family socioeconomic status and Chinese young children’ social competence: Parenting processes as mediators and contextualizing factors as moderators

Abstract

Based on data from 5,778 Chinese families with young children (13 to 36 months old), this study tested a model in which socioeconomic status (SES) was linked to child social competence through both parenting stress and positive parenting, and also examined whether this model varied as functions of three key contextualizing factors, including the number of children living in the household (i.e., one, two, or three), primary caregiver status (i.e., parents or grandparents), and living regions (i.e., urban, county, or rural). Overall, SES was found to be associated positively with child social competence via a negative association with parenting stress and a positive association with positive parenting; and patenting stress was also found to be negatively associated with positive parenting. Further, results of multi-group analyses indicated that: (a) across all contextualizing factor groups except for grandparent-headed families, parenting stress mediated the association between SES and social competence; (b) across all contextualizing factor groups except for the three-child families and the families living in the county areas, positive parenting served as a mediator between SES and social competence; and (c) SES was positively associated with social competence through parenting stress and positive parenting in one-child and two-child families, nuclear families, and urban and rural families, but not in three-child families, grandparent-headed families and county families. Our findings shed initial light on the understudied heterogeneity inherent within the link between SES and child socioemotional development in a Chinese cultural context, and also highlight some potential avenues for interventions aimed at promoting Chinese young children’ socioemotional development in low-SES family settings (i.e., intervening the parenting processes).