Background: Parenting plays a crucial role in shaping children’s wellbeing. It is a lifelong task that requires constant and intensive use of psychological resources and thus involves constant coping with stress. 

Objectives: The present study examined parental stress based on Abidin’s model, including parental characteristics known in the contemporary literature to have an impact on parental stress. A holistic perspective that includes all three components of the model has not been extensively studied and may enhance our understanding of the factors contributing to parenting stress by identifying the relationships between these components.

Participants and settings: The present sample consisted of 502 Israeli parents over the age of 18 who were married or in a committed relationship and had at least one child aged 3 to 5 years.

Methods: Participants were recruited through a web-based survey company and completed self-report questionnaires dealing with parenting stress, parental child-centrism, parental self-efficacy, personality traits, mentalizing ability, child temperament, and marital satisfaction. A series of SEM models was performed to identify the associations between the components of the model.

Results: The results of the present study support Abidin’s conceptualization of the factors contributing to parenting stress and indicate a central role for parental characteristics, especially self-efficacy and mentalizing ability.

Conclusions: The results highlight the importance of two cognitive mechanisms reflecting parents’ perceptions of their ability to fulfill the parenting role while coping with parenting stress. The findings are discussed in view of Conservation of Resources theory.

Osnat Lavenda is an associate professor of social work at Ariel University, Israel, whose research focuses on parenting, parental self-efficacy, mentalization, attachment, resilience, and responses to stress and trauma.