The construct of parental stress was introduced by Selye (1978) and has been actively researched since. Extensive research on the subject in the 1980s–1990s produced a nuanced understanding of stress (Lazarus, 1999). Currently, parental stress is defined as a personal response to stressors associated with being a parent and executing a parenting role (Abidin et al., 2022). It is an intensely negative reaction toward oneself and/or the child that occurs when a caregiver feels overwhelmed or lacking in the skills and resources required to fulfill the requirements of their parental role and has difficulties adapting to it (Rivas et al., 2021). Parental stress may manifest in all parents to varying degrees (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, 1996) and may be considered a psychological cost of being a parent (Deater-Deckard, 1998). It differs conceptually from other life stressors, such as financial problems or negative life events, although they are frequently related (Rivas et al., 2021).

Studies on parental stress have been conducted since the 1980s, initially focusing on clinical and high-risk populations and medical contexts to examine the stress experienced by parents (Abidin, 1982; Abidin and Wilfong, 1989). Gradually, in the 1990s, the view of parental stress shifted toward normalization. Research has shown that parenting stress might be a normative process that affects every parent, although its previous definition included parents’ perceptions of their children’s behavior and their feelings of incompetence in parenting (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, 1996). As Crnic and Greenberg (1990) wrote, “all parents have some experience with being nagged or whined at, settling arguments between siblings, repeatedly cleaning up their children’s messes, as well as a myriad of other possible everyday events of a similar nature. Although any one of these events may have little significance in and of itself, their cumulative impact over a day, several days, or longer may represent a meaningful stressor for a parent” (1628).

Crnic and Greenberg (1990) used the term “hassles” to describe the irritating demands that characterize the everyday transactions of parents with their environment. These hassles may be infrequent and situationally determined, or repetitive and stable.

Research studies have typically identified child and parental components of parental stress. The main child-related stressors are the daily routines associated with caring for children and the child’s undesirable behaviors. Parent-related stress can be caused by both objective factors (e.g., reduced time for sleep and leisure) and subjective ones (e.g., the perception of oneself as an incompetent parent; Crnic and Greenberg, 1990). Family composition and transitions such as separation or incarceration have also been found to be related to higher stress (Webster-Stratton, 1990; Barbot et al., 2014; Maguire, 2015; Steele et al., 2016; Gil-Rivas et al., 2017; Louie et al., 2017). A higher level of stress is typical for parents who see their children as difficult and demanding, or who perceive themselves as ineffective parents. Contradictory results have been obtained as to whether mothers or fathers tend to be more stressed (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, 1996; Deater-Deckard, 1998; Yeh, 2002; Oelofsen and Richardson, 2006; Alzawad et al., 2021; Perez-Brena et al., 2021; Gómez-Ortiz et al., 2023).

Parental stress has been associated with poor, harsh, neglectful, or abusive parenting, and was suggested to be a predictor of negative social adjustment in children. However, individual differences and parental behavior were discovered to be mediators between parental stress and child outcomes (Deater-Deckard, 1998). Factors relating to both the parent and the child contribute to parenting stress and are affected by it in a complex transactional process with consequences for the well-being of both parties (Crnic and Ross, 2017).

Parental experience is complicated, and recent studies within the social-ecological framework have demonstrated reciprocal relationships between parental and child behavior (Rivas et al., 2021). For example, children with a diminished sense of security display anger or distress, increasing parental stress and thereby creating a chaotic family environment. This then contributes to children’s behavioral problems and feelings of powerlessness, which lead to low self-esteem and high anxiety. Levels of parental stress are related to individual child differences and developmental maladjustment (Louie et al., 2017), particularly depressive symptoms, autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Thomason et al., 2014; van Steijn et al., 2014; Mackler et al., 2015; Stone et al., 2016; Barroso et al., 2018). Parental stress could also lead to child maltreatment and adverse childhood experiences, such as witnessing or experiencing domestic violence or receiving verbal and emotional abuse (Calvano et al., 2022; Geprägs et al., 2023). Therefore, it seems appropriate to consider parental stress more as a symptom indicating various problems, such as a family’s low SES, parent’s psychiatric disorders, illnesses, and difficult behavior of the child, than as a separate phenomenon.

In Russia, parental stress has not been studied intensively, and the articles dedicated to it have mostly only been published in the last few years (Savenysheva et al., 2019). However, despite this recent increased interest in investigating parental stress, there are few measures available. The Parental Stress Index has been validated on a Russian sample (Vasilenko et al., 2021) but is not yet available for free. To assess parental distress, questionnaires on daily stressors (Petrash et al., 2018) and parental burnout (Efimova, 2013) can be used. Our study is aimed at addressing the lack of research on parental stress and of valid and reliable measures, specifically by validating the Parental Stress Scale (PSS; Berry and Jones, 1995).

This paper reports on the initial psychometric properties of the Russian adaptation of PSS, which includes 16 items and two scales. There has previously been no reliable, convenient, and short instrument with which to assess levels of parental stress in the Russian population, so this tool could potentially fill this ga PSS can be used for research in the areas of developmental, family, clinical, and educational psychology as part of the process of designing prevention programs and psychological counseling for parents.

The data analysis of the Russian version of PSS provided evidence of acceptable reliability and convergent and divergent validity. It also showed this adaptation to include two factors. This result confirms the unstable factor structure of the questionnaire and corresponds with the results assessing PSS adaptations in different countries, in which either two (Pontoppidan et al., 2018; Nærde and Sommer Hukkelberg, 2020; Park et al., 2021; Kumalasari et al., 2022), three (Habibpour et al., 2018), or four (Algarvio et al., 2018) factors were obtained. The small yet significant associations between the PSS and PERMA-Profiler scales support the conceptual closeness, but not the similarity, of their constructs. This finding is important due to the need for more specific instruments to measure parenting experiences, rather than a general, multidimensional sense of well-being.

Forty years ago, the suggested psychological intervention goals for optimizing parental stress focused on stress reduction for parents with a high level of anxiety and stress augmentation for parents with low levels of stress, in order to increase sensitivity and commitment toward their children (Abidin, 1982). Later, parental stress was perceived as a uniquely negative characteristic, although normative. As a result, practitioners started developing diverse ways to help parents cope with it.

Different protective factors against parental stress have been discovered in studies, such as family values, social support within the family (Miranda et al., 2019; Lo et al., 2023), and co-parenting alliances (Delvecchio et al., 2015). Parental stress reduction is now considered a common and relevant goal of preventive and rehabilitative parenting programs (van Steijn et al., 2014; Rivas et al., 2021; Bauch et al., 2022; Nurlaila et al., 2023). Different informational campaigns, psychological programs, and recommendations have been developed to help parents understand and deal with their own stress and that of their children. They are aimed at anger management, communication skills, awareness, time management, and other skills. The study of factors that contribute to and prevent parental stress in Russian parents is still in an early stage, although it is an important and promising area of research. In this way, our adapted PSS opens opportunities for expanding knowledge in this area.

While this study presents a short yet psychometrically sound instrument, it has some limitations. These included the homogeneity of the sample, due to the similarity of the children’s ages and only mothers’ participation; the limited set of instruments; and the collection of data in only one region of Russia. To expand the knowledge of parental stress in Russian families, further research is needed to analyze the convergent and divergent validity using more instruments and with a more diverse sample of parents of younger and older children, mothers and fathers, and people from multiple regions. In addition, future validity studies should examine intended and unintended personal and social consequences of score use and interpretation of the adapted PSS (Hubley and Zumbo, 2011). Also, given the unstable factor structure of PSS across validation studies, future work should examine parental response processes, focusing on item interpretations, testing settings and time, cultural and personal values, and other possible extraneous variables contributing to the parental responses to PSS.

This paper reports the initial psychometric properties of the Russian version of PSS. The initial results provide enough evidence to use PSS to measure the positive and negative aspects of parenting in Russia. The adapted scale includes 16 items across two scales: parental stress and parental satisfaction. This tool widely extends the opportunities for research in the field of family and developmental psychology in Russian-speaking populations. It can be used both to study the specifics of parental stress in different social contexts or regions of the same country and for cross-cultural comparisons. Hence, data obtained from PSS can be used to develop intervention programs aimed at decreasing home violence and child abuse, reducing parental stress, and increasing the quality of parent–child relationships.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving humans were approved by Committee on Interuniversity Surveys and Ethical Assessment of Empirical Research of the HSE University. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

AB developed the main idea of the paper, wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and contributed to the manuscript revisions. DA contributed to the study’s conception and the first draft of the manuscript, performed the statistical analysis and contributed to the manuscript revisions. RB collected the data, organized the database, contributed to the study’s conception and design and the statistical analysis. EF contributed to the organizing the database and the statistical analysis. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study was conducted with support from the Basic Research Program of HSE University.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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