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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Anxiety and Stress Disorders
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1570652
Is Parental Anxiety related to Child Anxiety? Insights from a fourwave longitudinal study in a Chinese Context
Provisionally accepted- Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China
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Objective: There has been a growing concern regarding the development of parental anxiety and child anxiety. However, the dynamic bidirectional relationship between parental anxiety and child anxiety remains unclear, particularly across different genders and developmental stages. This study investigated the bidirectional relationships between parental anxiety and child anxiety, and further explored the relationships across gender and age.Methods: Data were collected across four waves from 2019 to 2022 in Sichuan Province, China, including 6,117 students (49.00% girls; 61.10% adolescents; M = 10.32 years, SD = 2.14). Parental anxiety was evaluated by the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), and child anxiety was assessed using the Screen for Child Anxiety-Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED). A random intercept crosslagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was constructed to distinguish between within-and between-person levels of parental anxiety and child anxiety.Results: Results found that parental anxiety significantly predicted child anxiety across all time points, which supports the "parent effects" model. Meanwhile, child anxiety also influenced parental anxiety from Time 3 to Time 4, partially supporting the "reciprocal effects" model. Moreover, the impact of parental anxiety on girls' anxiety was significantly stronger than on boys, and parental anxiety had a more substantial influence on children than on adolescents.These findings underscore the distinct roles of gender and developmental stages in the transmission of parental anxiety to children. The present findings provide theoretical and practical evidence for the development of parental anxiety and child anxiety in the Chinese context.
Keywords: Parental anxiety, Child anxiety, gender, Children, adolescents, longitudinal data
Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 08 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shek, LI, Yang and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Daniel Tan Lei Shek, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.