The analysis modeled parental psychological control and career decision-making self-efficacy as parallel predictors rather than treating them as steps in a single causal chain. Parental control was considered a relatively distant developmental influence, while self-efficacy represented a more immediate psychological resource. In the final regression model, the two variables together explained 22.5% of the variance in employment anxiety. Parental control retained a positive standardized association with anxiety, whereas self-efficacy retained a negative association, even after both were entered alongside gender and academic major. The magnitude of these relationships was modest rather than universal: the data explain a meaningful share of variation, but most variation in reported anxiety remained unaccounted for.

All participants were junior students at one Chinese university who were about to enter the graduation job-hunting season. The researchers distributed 885 online questionnaires through the Wenjuanxing platform, removed incomplete or careless responses and excluded statistical outliers, leaving 509 valid cases, an effective response rate of 57.51%. The sample comprised 199 men, or 39.1%, and 310 women, or 60.9%, and included students in science and engineering, humanities and social sciences, and medicine. Female students reported higher employment anxiety and lower career decision-making self-efficacy than male students in bivariate tests. There were no significant gender differences in parental psychological control or either measure of motivational regulation.

Participants completed Chinese versions of the Future Employment Anxiety Scale, the Work Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation Scale, the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale and the Parental Psychological Control Scale. After item analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the researchers used 13 items for employment anxiety, six for parental control, 22 for career self-efficacy and three each for external and identified regulation. All items used a five-point agreement scale, with higher scores indicating more of the measured construct. The instruments were translated and, in some cases, contextually adapted for Chinese students, but a formal back-translation was not performed. The external-regulation subscale also had lower internal consistency than the other measures, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.671, so findings involving that construct require particular caution.

The measurement model had acceptable but not uniformly strong fit: the chi-square ratio was 4.082, the root mean square error of approximation was 0.078, the comparative fit index was 0.918 and the Tucker-Lewis index was 0.903. Correlations initially produced a seemingly straightforward picture. Parental psychological control was positively correlated with employment anxiety at r = 0.302, while career self-efficacy was negatively correlated with it at r = −0.379; both relationships were significant at p < 0.001. Neither motivational-regulation measure had a significant zero-order correlation with anxiety. That pattern changed in the multivariable model, where both identified and external regulation were positively associated with anxiety after the two predictors were considered jointly.

The parallel mediation analysis produced four statistically significant indirect paths, assessed with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples. Lower external regulation and lower identified regulation each helped explain the positive association between parental control and anxiety. The indirect effect through identified regulation was −0.0205, with a 95% confidence interval from −0.041 to −0.005, while the path through external regulation was −0.0155, with an interval from −0.033 to −0.002. By contrast, higher self-efficacy was associated with more identified and external regulation, and both routes then showed positive indirect associations with anxiety. The path through identified regulation was the largest, with an estimate of 0.1291 and a 95% interval of 0.068 to 0.203; the external-regulation path was 0.0378, with an interval of 0.011 to 0.073.

These opposing direct and indirect paths created what the researchers termed masking, or suppression, effects. Parental control had a positive direct association with anxiety but a negative total indirect association through motivation, attenuating its overall relationship by a reported 18.45%. Career self-efficacy had a negative direct association with anxiety but a positive indirect association through motivation, offsetting 28.74% of that direct relationship. Its total association with anxiety nevertheless remained negative, with an unstandardized total effect of −0.414 and a 95% bootstrap confidence interval from −0.551 to −0.285. In short, greater career confidence predicted less anxiety overall, but it was also linked to stronger motivation for employment goals and greater concern about their outcomes.

The authors caution against interpreting the positive links between both forms of motivation and anxiety as evidence that motivation is inherently harmful. Identified regulation may encourage exploration, clearer goals and active engagement, while external regulation may reflect attention to practical needs such as income, employment security and social evaluation. At the same time, a highly uncertain job market can make intense goal commitment feel burdensome and keep outcomes at the center of a student’s attention. The proposed explanation—that employment pressure and uncertainty help account for these associations—is theoretically plausible, but the study did not directly measure either condition. The results also do not show that a less anxious student is necessarily better adjusted: weaker motivation could reduce goal-related pressure while also indicating less engagement with career preparation.

Several design limitations prevent strong causal or broad population claims. The convenience sample came from a single university and consisted entirely of third-year students nearing graduation, so the findings may not extend to students in other academic years, institutions, countries or labor markets. The cross-sectional questionnaire design cannot establish temporal order, and all core variables were self-reported. The model omitted potentially important influences such as perceived employment pressure, career adaptability and social support, and it did not test whether career self-efficacy itself changes as students approach graduation. With 509 students and a convenience sampling method, the results are best understood as a detailed snapshot of a particular transition period. They nevertheless show that employment anxiety is statistically linked not only to family pressure and personal confidence, but also to the way students regulate their motivation while confronting an uncertain labor market.

Subject of Research: How parental psychological control, career self-efficacy and motivational regulation are associated with employment anxiety among Chinese college students approaching graduation.

Article Title: The effects of parental psychological control and career decision-making self-efficacy on college students’ employment anxiety: the mediating role of motivational regulation

Article References: Guo, P., Wang, C., Fu, H., & Zhang, J. (2026). The effects of parental psychological control and career decision-making self-efficacy on college students’ employment anxiety: the mediating role of motivational regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1947477. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1947477

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1947477

Keywords: employment anxiety, parental psychological control, career self-efficacy, motivational regulation, identified regulation, external regulation, college students, job search, Self-Determination Theory, China, effects, parental

The accounts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by McClelland’s achievement motivation framework and self-determination theory. Parents described investing time and resources in their children’s swimming participation, with family life reorganized around training schedules. They also described children developing a sense of indebtedness following parental investment.

Researchers characterized this as a sacrifice–obligation dynamic in the narratives rather than as a demonstrated psychological mechanism. The interviews showed that parental roles were differentiated after competitive failure, while family contributions were distributed unevenly. Some contributions were readily visible, whereas others involved less visible support connected to organizing everyday life around training.

The study examined how parents described sacrifice, success, failure and the organization of family life, and what those accounts might reveal about the athletes’ motivational worlds. The authors interpret the motivational implications as analytically constructed propositions about possible family-level narrative and relational processes, not as findings about the children themselves. The evidence is limited to a small qualitative sample, with only one parent from each family participating.

The young athletes were neither interviewed nor assessed, so the results reflect parents’ perceptions rather than observed family processes or measured child outcomes. The study therefore cannot establish how children experienced parental behavior, whether parental achievement orientations were associated with child well-being, or whether family arrangements had causal effects. The abstract proposes that future multi-informant research could test these interpretations, but the present study did not perform that assessment.

Subject of Research: Parents’ accounts of family life and motivational contexts in competitive youth swimming in Türkiye

Article Title: Parental achievement orientations and parent-perceived child Well-being in competitive youth swimming: A qualitative study with parent in Türkiye

Article References: Kalkan, N., Zekioğlu, A., Urhan, B. U., Korkut, F., Uysal, S. N., Tejaswi, J., & Govindasamy, K. (2026). Parental achievement orientations and parent-perceived child Well-being in competitive youth swimming: A qualitative study with parent in Türkiye. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05663-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05663-3

Keywords: competitive youth swimming, parental involvement, parent interviews, child well-being, achievement motivation, family labor, competitive failure, qualitative study, Türkiye, Parental, achievement, orientations

Computer and information literacy, or CIL, measures the ability to use computers to investigate, create and communicate effectively in different settings. Computational thinking, or CT, assesses the ability to recognize real-world problems that can be expressed computationally and to develop algorithmic solutions. In the study’s within-school comparisons, strict limits were negatively associated with CIL scores at B = −14.94 and with CT scores at B = −17.31, with both p-values below .001. Flexible limits that made exceptions for homework showed the opposite pattern: their associations with CIL and CT were positive at B = 2.17 and B = 8.34, respectively, also with p-values below .001.

Similar contrasts appeared when researchers compared schools. Schools with more students reporting strict parental limits had lower average performance in CIL and CT, with coefficients of −48.12 and −47.22, both statistically significant at p < .001. Schools in which flexible rules were more common instead had higher average CIL, at B = 9.74 with p < .05, and substantially higher CT, at B = 33.67 with p < .001. The models distinguished a student’s household rule from the prevalence of similar rules among classmates, allowing the analysis to separate within-school individual differences from broader school-level patterns.

The study used three-level linear models reflecting the structure of ICILS, which places students within schools and schools within countries. In null models, 34% of the variance in CIL and 48% in CT was attributable to differences between schools, while 50% and 22%, respectively, was associated with between-country variation. The researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status, gender, immigration status, computer experience, information and communications technology self-efficacy and internet access at home. Continuous variables were standardized, school-average predictors were included alongside group-mean-centered individual variables, and models were estimated with restricted maximum likelihood.

Because ICILS assessment outcomes were reported as five plausible values per domain, the researchers fitted separate models for each set and combined the estimates using Rubin’s rules. They also incorporated rescaled student sampling weights to reflect the study’s complex survey design, with weights adjusted within each country. The CIL analysis included students in 4,609 schools across 29 countries, while the CT analysis covered 2,722 schools in 19 countries. This difference in coverage reflects the fact that CIL was a core domain in more participating systems, whereas CT was administered as an optional domain.

Household circumstances remained important even after these controls. Socioeconomic status was positively associated with both outcomes at the individual and school levels, as were general ICT self-efficacy and home internet access. Computer experience was also positively associated with performance within schools, at B = 8.51 for CIL and B = 9.74 for CT, both with p < .001. The socioeconomic measure combined parental education, parental occupation and the number of books available at home. These relationships mean that the screen-time estimates should not be interpreted as isolated effects of a single parental choice.

The clearest evidence of socioeconomic moderation concerned flexible rules and computational thinking. The interaction between socioeconomic status and flexible limits was positive at B = 3.82, with p < .01, indicating that the association between homework exceptions and CT was stronger among students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. No statistically significant moderation by socioeconomic status was detected for CIL. The interaction between socioeconomic status and strict limits was also not significant for CT, meaning the evidence does not show that socioeconomic background altered the negative association observed for rigid restrictions.

The results add large-scale evidence to a body of research in which screen restrictions have produced inconsistent findings. Previous work has linked restrictions to fewer opportunities to develop digital skills, while other studies have found benefits from moderate technology use or structured parental guidance. The new analysis suggests that the relevant distinction may be purpose as well as duration: a rule that ends a student’s access before educational work is completed differs from one that places recreational use in a structured boundary while allowing school tasks. The analysis is consistent with, but cannot prove, the possibility that flexible rules preserve opportunities for learning by doing while strict limits remove access at moments when digital tools may be needed.

Several limitations constrain what can be concluded. The design is cross-sectional and relies on students reporting whether parental limits apply during school days, so it cannot show whether rules preceded changes in digital competence or whether more digitally capable families selected particular strategies. The analysis cannot determine whether the associations operate through academic engagement, self-regulation, parental digital knowledge or other mechanisms. CT was assessed in fewer countries than CIL, and only student-level weights were used, as the authors noted limitations in available multilevel weighting methods. The relatively broad category of screen regulation also leaves the frequency, consistency and quality of parental enforcement unresolved.

Future research could test the proposed mechanisms with longitudinal and mixed-method studies, while also measuring negotiation, parental digital competence and co-learning more precisely. Comparisons across cultures could examine whether expectations about obedience, independence and technology use change the relationship between rules and digital performance. For now, the study’s clearest result is that “less screen time” and “more structured screen use” are not interchangeable: in large international Grade 8 samples, no-exception restrictions were associated with weaker digital performance, while flexible homework exceptions were associated with stronger performance, especially in computational thinking and among students with higher socioeconomic status.

Subject of Research: Parental screen-time regulation and adolescents’ computer literacy and computational thinking

Article Title: Parental screentime limits and child computer and information literacy and computational thinking: a multilevel analysis of 2023 ICILS data

Article References: Tlessov, A., Courtney, M. G. R., Vassilova, M., & Kambatyrova, A. (2026). Parental screentime limits and child computer and information literacy and computational thinking: a multilevel analysis of 2023 ICILS data. Large-scale Assessments in Education, 14(1), Article 56. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-026-00328-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40536-026-00328-4

Keywords: screen time, adolescents, digital literacy, computational thinking, parental mediation, ICILS 2023, socioeconomic status, computer skills, Parental, screentime, limits, child

The study was conducted between May and August 2025 and was described by its authors as descriptive and correlational. It examined an association rather than testing an intervention or following families longitudinally. The sample was restricted to mothers of primary-school-aged children in selected disadvantaged areas of Şanlıurfa, so the findings are most directly applicable to that population rather than to all parents, fathers, families elsewhere or caregivers of children in other age groups.

Participants completed a demographic information form, the Parenting Stress Scale and the Digital Parenting Attitude Scale. The researchers used independent-samples t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey post-hoc tests, Pearson correlation and linear regression, with statistical significance set at p < .05. These methods were used to compare scores among measured groups and estimate the relationship between parental stress and digital parenting attitudes within the study sample.

The mean Parenting Stress Scale score was 35.31 ± 8.62, while the mean Digital Parenting Attitude Scale score was 50.43 ± 6.97. These values summarize the sample’s average responses on the two instruments. The source abstract does not provide the scales’ full item structures, directional interpretations or clinical cutoffs, so the mean scores should not be treated as thresholds for high stress or particular parenting attitudes.

The principal result was a positive correlation of r = .241 between parental stress and digital parenting attitudes, with p < .001. A simple linear regression produced a corresponding standardized coefficient of β = 0.241 and an R² of 0.058, also with p < .001. In statistical terms, the association was detectable but weak, and parental stress accounted for approximately 5.8% of the observed variation in digital parenting attitude scores in the model.

Scores on the two measures also differed across several participant and household characteristics. Parental stress varied significantly according to mothers’ educational status, children’s daily media use and the method used to control children’s internet use, with all reported comparisons at p < .05. Digital parenting attitude scores differed significantly by mothers’ age, family type, number of children and the method used to control children’s internet use. The abstract does not report the magnitude of every subgroup difference or establish the reasons for them.

The findings do not establish that highly stressed parents are uniformly controlling, permissive or otherwise different in their approach to digital media. The study measured parental stress and digital parenting attitudes at a single point and found only a modest association between them. Because the design was cross-sectional, it cannot determine whether stress influences attitudes, whether attitudes relate to stress, whether other measured or unmeasured factors contribute to both, or how these factors evolve within individual families.

Based on the findings, the authors concluded that public-health interventions combining parental-stress management with digital-parenting education should be strengthened in primary healthcare services. The study did not test such a combined intervention, compare it with another approach, or measure whether changing stress leads to a change in digital parenting attitudes. Its results identify an association relevant to service planning while leaving the effectiveness of the proposed approach for future research to evaluate.

Subject of Research: Association between parental stress and digital parenting attitudes among mothers of children aged 6–12 in Şanlıurfa, Türkiye

Article Title: How parental stress shapes digital parenting: a study in disadvantaged areas

Article References: Ersin, F., Kılıc, M., & Akcayır, D. (2026). How parental stress shapes digital parenting: a study in disadvantaged areas. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29988-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29988-1

Keywords: parental stress, digital parenting, digital parenting attitudes, children's media use, disadvantaged communities, Şanlıurfa, Türkiye, cross-sectional study, public health, mothers, parental, stress

The research team followed 1,132 adolescents in 23 classrooms at two urban middle schools, surveying them at three waves spaced six months apart. The participants, drawn from the parent longitudinal study approved by the Ethics Committee of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, provided written informed consent along with a parent or legal guardian. Neglect was measured with reports covering the preceding 12 months, while peer victimization captured experiences across the same intervals, allowing the researchers to model how changes in one domain related to changes in the other across adjacent six-month periods.

The methodological centerpiece was a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model, or RI-CLPM, an analytical framework that has reshaped how developmental scientists interpret longitudinal panel data. Traditional cross-lagged panel models conflate two fundamentally different sources of association: stable differences between adolescents that persist across the whole study, and moment-to-moment temporal dynamics within each individual adolescent. The RI-CLPM separates these by assigning each adolescent a random intercept—a stable trait-like level of neglect and victimization—and then examining whether deviations from that personal baseline at one wave predict deviations at the next. Only the second, within-person component speaks to causal processes unfolding over time.

The between-adolescent results were clear and consistent. The pooled random-intercept covariance between parental neglect and peer victimization was 0.309, with a 95% credible interval spanning 0.233 to 0.384—a positive association indicating that adolescents with higher stable levels of neglect also carried higher stable levels of peer victimization across the entire study period. In practical terms, the two adversities clustered in the same young people as enduring characteristics, echoing decades of research showing that family adversity and peer mistreatment tend to co-occur in adolescence.

The within-person results, however, told a strikingly different story. When the researchers examined whether an adolescent’s own deviation from their personal baseline of neglect at one wave predicted a deviation in victimization at the next wave, the cross-lagged association from neglect to victimization was −0.052, with a 95% credible interval from −0.180 to 0.077—an interval that straddles zero and therefore provides no evidence of a directional effect. The reverse pathway, from victimization to neglect, was similarly null at −0.051, with a credible interval from −0.165 to 0.062. Neither direction showed a statistically detectable average within-person cross-lagged association in this design.

To probe the finding further, the team conducted exploratory cross-lagged panel network analyses, examining whether specific items within the neglect and victimization scales showed recurring cross-domain associations across the intervals. Using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regularization to identify robust patterns, the item-level analyses found no recurring cross-domain association that held up consistently across waves. The absence of robust item-level signatures suggests the null within-person result was not masking a handful of specific neglect behaviors—such as lack of supervision or emotional unavailability—driving specific forms of peer mistreatment in a way the aggregate analysis would have obscured.

The authors are careful to note an important technical limitation: because neglect reports covered the preceding 12 months, adjacent recall windows overlapped by approximately six months, which constrains how precisely temporal effects can be interpreted. This overlap means the study cannot exclude weak, differently timed, or heterogeneous within-person processes—effects that might operate on shorter timescales, vary across adolescents, or emerge only under specific conditions the six-month design could not capture. The null result is a statement about what this design detected, not a definitive claim that no within-person dynamics exist anywhere in the data.

Still, the findings carry substantial weight for how scientists and practitioners think about the link between family and peer contexts. The stable between-adolescent co-occurrence supports considering family and peer experiences jointly in assessment: a clinician or school counselor identifying parental neglect should be alert to the elevated likelihood of peer victimization, and vice versa. But the absence of significant within-person cross-lagged associations cautions against assuming that intervening on one domain will automatically reduce the other over time—a causal assumption that many prevention programs have implicitly made without longitudinal evidence at the individual level.

The study also illustrates a broader methodological shift sweeping through developmental psychology. As random-intercept cross-lagged panel models become standard, many previously reported cross-lagged effects in panel studies are being reinterpreted as artifacts of stable between-person differences rather than genuine within-person dynamics. This study adds parental neglect and peer victimization to the growing list of adversity pairings where the apparent longitudinal association dissolves once stable trait-like levels are properly separated from temporal change, underscoring why the distinction between between-person and within-person inference matters for science communication as much as for research design.

For now, the message for researchers, educators, and families is nuanced. Parental neglect and peer victimization do cluster together in adolescence as enduring, co-occurring adversities, and the two contexts deserve joint attention in assessment and support. But the evidence from this six-month, three-wave design does not show one experience causing the other within individuals over time. Understanding whether weak or differently timed dynamics exist—and whether they vary across adolescents—will require studies with finer temporal resolution, longer follow-up, and designs capable of capturing heterogeneous processes that the current analysis, by its own careful admission, could not rule out.

Subject of Research: Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations

Article Title: Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations

Article References: Li, Z., Guo, M., Mao, H., Chen, J., & Zhang, B. (2026). Parental neglect and peer victimization: stable between-adolescent co-occurrence but no significant within-person cross-lagged associations. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05622-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05622-y

Keywords: adolescence, parental neglect, peer victimization, longitudinal study, developmental psychology, RI-CLPM, BMC Psychology, Parental, neglect, peer, victimization, stable

The researchers set out to examine the relationship between parental health literacy and caregiver burden among parents of children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus, an autoimmune condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Unlike type 2 diabetes, type 1 typically appears in childhood and demands continuous self-management, which in practice means family management. Every meal, every bout of exercise, every illness, and every night of sleep is punctuated by decisions that depend on interpreting numbers and acting on them correctly.

Health literacy, in the technical sense used by the researchers, refers to a person’s capacity to access, understand, evaluate, and apply health-related information. For parents of children with type 1 diabetes, this skill set is exercised constantly: reading nutrition labels, interpreting glucose meter readings and continuous glucose monitor trends, calculating insulin doses, recognizing the early signs of hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia, and communicating with a rotating cast of pediatric endocrinologists, nurses, and dietitians. The study’s central hypothesis was that parents with stronger health literacy would experience less caregiver burden, plausibly because they feel more competent and less anxious in managing the disease.

To test this, the team conducted a descriptive and cross-sectional study with 156 parents of children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling between January and May 2025, using an online questionnaire distributed via social media platforms and online communication applications to reach eligible parents. The study was reported in accordance with the STROBE guidelines, the international standard for transparent reporting of observational research, and received ethics approval from the Yalova University Health Sciences Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee.

Three instruments formed the backbone of the data collection. An information form captured demographic and clinical characteristics of the parents and children. The Health Literacy Scale–Short Form measured the parents’ ability to engage with health information. The Zarit Burden Interview, one of the most widely used instruments in caregiving research, quantified the subjective load that caregivers experience across domains such as physical health, emotional well-being, social life, and finances. Together, these tools allowed the researchers to test whether literacy and burden moved in opposite directions, as they predicted.

The sample sketched a familiar portrait of pediatric type 1 diabetes caregiving. Mothers made up 67.3 percent of the participants and fathers 32.7 percent, reflecting the persistent pattern in which mothers absorb the largest share of chronic disease management at home. Most of the children, 61.5 percent, were between 7 and 12 years old, an age span that spans the transition from supervised primary-school years to the early stirrings of adolescent independence. The average time since diagnosis was 3.96 years, with a standard deviation of 2.85, meaning the families had lived with the disease for a wide range of durations, from newly diagnosed to nearly a decade of daily management.

The headline numbers told a clear story. Parents scored a mean of 38.85 on the health literacy scale, with a standard deviation of 7.81, and a mean caregiver burden score of 32.83, with a standard deviation of 12.17. Statistical analysis revealed a negative and statistically significant correlation between the two measures: as parental health literacy rose, caregiver burden fell. The correlation coefficient was modest at r = -0.162, with a p-value of 0.013, meaning the relationship was unlikely to be a fluke of sampling but was also far from the whole explanation.

Before running their multiple linear regression, the researchers performed an outlier analysis to satisfy the assumptions of the model, a methodological step that helps prevent a handful of extreme respondents from distorting the results. The regression then painted a more nuanced picture than the simple correlation. Four variables emerged as significantly associated with caregiver burden: parent age, child age, health literacy, and household income status. Together, the model explained 25.9 percent of the total variance in burden scores, a figure that underscores just how multidimensional caregiver strain really is. Notably, the strongest single predictor was the child’s age, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.437, suggesting that the developmental stage of the child weighs on parents more heavily than any other measured factor.

Why would a child’s age loom so large? The study’s data cannot answer that question directly, but the pattern is consistent with what clinicians observe in practice. School-age children face changing routines, unpredictable activity levels, and growing autonomy over food choices, all of which complicate glucose management. As children approach adolescence, the handover of responsibility from parent to child introduces its own anxieties, since developmental readiness to self-manage diabetes rarely arrives on a fixed schedule. The finding that income status also contributed to burden aligns with the well-documented financial strain of diabetes supplies, technology, and dietary demands, which families with fewer resources feel most acutely.

The authors are careful about the limits of their results. The association between health literacy and burden, while statistically significant, was modest in magnitude, and the cross-sectional design means the study captures a single moment in time rather than tracking how literacy and burden evolve together. Convenience sampling through online channels may also have reached parents who are more digitally connected and potentially more health-literate than the broader population of caregivers. The regression model, for all its significant predictors, still left roughly three quarters of the variance in burden unexplained, a reminder that factors outside this analysis, from marital dynamics to social support to the child’s glycemic control, likely shape the experience of caregiving as well.

Even so, the findings carry a practical message for pediatric nursing and diabetes care teams. If a parent’s ability to access, understand, evaluate, and apply health information is linked to how heavily the caregiving load sits on their shoulders, then education is not just about better glucose numbers; it may also be a form of psychological support. The authors suggest that future studies should evaluate whether nurse-led education and counseling programs targeting these health literacy skills are associated with improved caregiver outcomes. In a condition where families perform the bulk of medical care at home, every investment in making parents more confident readers of their child’s disease may pay a double dividend: sharper daily management and a lighter emotional load for the people carrying it.

Subject of Research: The relationship between parental health literacy and caregiver burden in parents of children with type 1 diabetes mellitus

Article Title: Parental healthliteracy as a predictor of caregiver burden among parents of children with type1 diabetes mellitus: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Yeşi̇l, F., & Avçi̇n, E. (2026). Parental healthliteracy as a predictor of caregiver burden among parents of children with type1 diabetes mellitus: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05319-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05319-y

Keywords: health literacy, caregiver burden, type 1 diabetes, pediatric nursing, parents, Zarit Burden Interview, cross-sectional study, child age, income status, diabetes self-management, nurse-led education, Parental

Functional gastrointestinal disorders are among the most common diagnoses in paediatric medicine, encompassing conditions such as functional abdominal pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and functional constipation, defined clinically by the Rome IV criteria. Because no structural, biochemical, or inflammatory abnormality explains the symptoms, these disorders have long sat at the intersection of gastroenterology and psychology. Within the biopsychosocial framework that now dominates thinking about FGIDs, the family environment is recognised as a powerful modulator of how a child experiences and expresses symptoms. Yet most previous research compared families of affected children only with healthy families, making it impossible to tell whether elevated parental distress reflected something specific to functional illness or merely the universal stress of raising a child with a chronic gastrointestinal condition.

The Basel team, led by Anna Geser and Sebastian Weber of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel, together with senior authors Margarete Bolten and Eva Unternaehrer, set out to disentangle these possibilities. Between February 2024 and February 2025, they recruited 65 parents of children aged two to twelve years whose FGIDs had been diagnosed according to Rome IV criteria. Two comparison groups were assembled at the same hospital: 62 parents of children with organic gastrointestinal diseases, in which a structural or biological cause had been identified, and 90 parents of healthy children. By including an organic disease control group, the design could separate the specific psychosocial signature of functional illness from the broader caregiving burden of chronic paediatric disease.

Each parent completed three well-validated psychometric instruments. Psychological distress was measured with the four-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-4), which screens jointly for anxiety and depression. Somatic symptom burden — the tendency to experience and report physical symptoms such as pain, fatigue, or gastrointestinal complaints — was assessed with the eight-item Somatic Symptom Scale (SSS-8). Personality traits were captured with the ten-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), from which the researchers extracted neuroticism, the disposition toward emotional instability and negative affect. Because the score distributions were skewed, the team applied non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis tests for initial group comparisons and then refined their estimates using covariate-adjusted negative binomial regression models, reporting incidence rate ratios with appropriate confidence intervals and checking model assumptions with variance inflation factors and Akaike information criteria.

The results were unambiguous. Parents of children with FGIDs scored significantly higher than both comparison groups on all three measures, with differences reaching statistical significance at p < 0.01. In the adjusted regression models, both the organic disease group and the healthy group showed consistently lower scores relative to the FGID group, with incidence rate ratios ranging from 0.31 to 0.77 — a substantial gap that survived correction for demographic and clinical covariates. In practical terms, parental anxiety and depression screening, based on the two subscales of the PHQ-4, yielded the highest positive rates in the FGID group, at roughly 17 percent for anxiety and about 25 percent for depression, well above the levels observed among parents of children with identifiable organic disease.

The neuroticism finding is particularly striking because personality traits are typically considered stable dispositions rather than situational responses. Elevated neuroticism among parents of children with FGIDs cannot plausibly be explained as the transient stress of hospital visits, since parents of children with equally chronic organic gastrointestinal disease did not show the same elevation. One plausible interpretation, consistent with the biopsychosocial model, is that neuroticism and functional illness cluster within families: the same dispositional sensitivity to negative emotion that shapes a parent’s own experience may influence how symptoms are perceived, interpreted, and amplified in the child. Previous research on familial aggregation of pain and somatic complaints has repeatedly suggested that children of parents with high somatic symptom reports tend to report more symptoms themselves, a pattern of modelling and reinforcement that could be especially relevant when the child’s symptoms are, by definition, not explained by observable pathology.

The somatic symptom data add an important mechanistic nuance. In the initial comparisons, parents of children with FGIDs reported a markedly higher somatic symptom burden than either control group. However, when the researchers added psychological distress as an additional covariate, the differences in somatic symptom scores were attenuated. This statistical pattern suggests that the elevated physical symptom reporting among these parents is substantially intertwined with — and possibly mediated by — their anxiety and depressive symptoms. In other words, the parents’ bodily complaints and emotional distress may represent two faces of the same underlying vulnerability, a coupling that mirrors the gut–brain interaction hypothesised to drive the children’s own functional symptoms.

The clinical implications are considerable. If parents of children with FGIDs carry a distinct psychosocial risk profile, then treating the child in isolation may miss a critical lever for recovery. The authors argue that their findings highlight the importance of family-centred approaches to paediatric FGID care, in which parental distress, somatic symptom awareness, and maladaptive illness behaviour are assessed and addressed alongside the child’s symptoms. Screening instruments as brief as the PHQ-4 could feasibly be administered during a routine paediatric gastroenterology visit, identifying families who might benefit from psychological support, psychoeducation about the gut–brain axis, or targeted interventions that reduce parental anxiety about the child’s unexplained symptoms. Such measures could interrupt the feedback loops in which parental concern heightens child symptom focus, which in turn intensifies parental distress.

The study’s cross-sectional design imposes limits on interpretation: elevated parental neuroticism, distress, and somatic symptoms could contribute to the child’s disorder, arise in response to it, or, most likely, reflect bidirectional influences over time. The modest sample sizes — 65, 62, and 90 parents — while adequate for the statistical models employed, leave room for uncertainty in subgroup estimates, and all data derive from self-report questionnaires at a single Swiss tertiary centre. Longitudinal and genetically informed designs will be needed to establish causal direction. Nevertheless, by showing that the parental psychosocial burden in paediatric FGIDs exceeds that seen in organic gastrointestinal disease of comparable chronicity, the Basel team has strengthened the case that functional disorders are genuinely systemic family phenomena. For clinicians confronting a child’s debilitating abdominal pain with no biological explanation, the message is that the family context is not background noise but an active ingredient in the illness — one that rigorous, empathetic assessment can begin to address.

Subject of Research: Parental psychological distress, somatic symptoms and neuroticism in paediatric functional gastrointestinal disorders

Article Title: Parental psychological distress, somatic symptoms and neuroticism in paediatric functional gastrointestinal disorders: comparison with organic and healthy controls

Article References: Geser, A., Weber, S., Légeret, C., Furlano, R., Bolten, M., & Unternaehrer, E. (2026). Parental psychological distress, somatic symptoms and neuroticism in paediatric functional gastrointestinal disorders: comparison with organic and healthy controls. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07681-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07681-x

Keywords: functional gastrointestinal disorders, gut-brain interaction, parental distress, somatic symptoms, neuroticism, paediatrics, Rome IV criteria, anxiety, depression, biopsychosocial model, Parental, psychological

Materialistic values, defined by the prominence people place on financial success, possessions, and physical appearance relative to other life priorities, have been extensively linked to poorer well-being. Meta-analytic evidence, including a large 2014 synthesis by Dittmar and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that a strong materialistic orientation is reliably associated with lower personal well-being. More recent meta-analytic work by Bradshaw and colleagues in 2023 extended this conclusion to the domain of life goals, finding universal wellness costs when people prioritize extrinsic goals over intrinsic ones. Understanding where these values come from, and how they are or are not passed down within families, therefore carries practical significance well beyond academic curiosity.

To probe the mechanisms of value transmission, the research team recruited 208 young adults, of whom 168 were women and 40 were men, with a mean age of 20.20 years and a standard deviation of 6.42 years. Participants, described as being in the stage of emerging adulthood theorized by Jeffrey Arnett, reported on their own materialistic values, their perceptions of their parents’ materialism, the parenting environment they grew up in, and their own life goals. Emerging adulthood is a developmental window in which identity, values, and long-term aspirations are still actively being shaped, making it a strategic period in which to examine the residue of family socialization.

Statistically, the study employed moderated mediation analysis, a regression-based framework popularized by Andrew Hayes that tests whether an indirect effect operates through a mediator and whether that indirect effect changes strength depending on a moderator. In this design, children’s materialism was modeled as the mediator linking parental materialism to children’s life goals, while the perceived family environment, specifically whether it was democratic or authoritarian in character, was tested as a moderator of the first path, the link between parental materialism and children’s own materialism. This architecture allowed the researchers to ask not merely whether parents influence children, but under what relational conditions that influence materializes.

The results delivered a surprise in the direct path. Parental materialism, on its own, did not predict whether the young adult participants endorsed extrinsic life goals centered on wealth, fame, or image. Values transmission, in other words, is not automatic. A materialistic parent does not reliably produce a materialistically driven child simply by existing as a role model. This finding echoes a broader literature on parent-child value similarity, including work by Barni, Knafo-Noam, and Schwartz, which shows that resemblance between parents and children on values is often modest and depends heavily on the quality of the relationship and the socialization context rather than on parental intentions alone.

The critical factor turned out to be the family environment. When participants perceived a democratic family climate, one characterized by warmth, dialogue, negotiation, and responsiveness to the child’s perspective, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was positive. In such homes, materialistic parents apparently modeled and communicated consumer values that children absorbed and internalized. In contrast, under an authoritarian family environment, marked by coercive control, strict demands, and limited open communication, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was negative. Children raised in authoritarian households were less likely to adopt their parents’ materialistic orientation, suggesting that value transmission requires a channel of influence that authoritarian climates appear to close.

The interpretation offered by the researchers is that the family environment enables or disables the transmission of materialistic values, and that these values, once adopted, guide young people’s focus toward extrinsic objectives. Theoretical frameworks from Grusec and Goodnow on value internalization help explain the pattern: children internalize parental values most effectively when they accurately perceive the values’ content and accept them, both of which are fostered by democratic, warm parenting and undermined by coercive discipline that provokes resistance rather than emulation. Related consumer research, such as Richins and Chaplin’s work on material parenting, similarly shows that how goods are used in the parenting process matters as much as parental attitudes toward possessions themselves.

Why might authoritarian parenting blunt materialistic transmission? One possibility is reactance: adolescents in controlling households may distance themselves from parental models, rejecting values associated with parents they experience as domineering. Another relates to emotional security, since prior research, including Ching and Wu’s study of parental conflict and adolescent materialism, suggests that insecurity can itself foster materialistic values as a compensatory mechanism, but the dynamics of that compensation may interact with parenting style in complex ways. The moderated mediation results indicate that materialism in children did serve as the conduit through which family conditions ultimately related to extrinsic life goals, meaning that the family climate shaped children’s materialism, and children’s materialism in turn shaped the goals they set for their lives.

The study’s limitations warrant caution in interpretation. The design was cross-sectional and correlational, relying on retrospective perceptions of parenting rather than observed family behavior, so causal direction cannot be firmly established; it is possible, for instance, that shared materialism produces a more relaxed family climate rather than the reverse. The sample was also skewed toward women, and all measures were self-reported by adult children, leaving parental perspectives unmeasured directly. The authors note that data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon request, and the work followed ethical protocols including informed consent.

Nevertheless, the findings carry clear implications. For practitioners and parents concerned about the cultural pull of consumerism, the message is that values are not inherited through instruction alone but through relational climate. Democratic parenting appears to open a channel through which parental values, for better or worse, flow to children, which means the same openness that helps transmit generosity, curiosity, or civic engagement can also transmit materialism. Authoritarian environments, while perhaps limiting materialistic contagion, come with their own well-documented psychological costs. The broader takeaway is a call for intentionality: parents who wish to buffer their children against materialistic values may need to attend not only to their own consumption habits and stated ideals, but to the everyday emotional and communicative fabric of family life in which those values either take root or wither. As societies grapple with the well-being toll of extrinsic goal pursuit documented across cultures, this research suggests that the first and perhaps most powerful arena of intervention remains the home.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals traces back to self-determination theory, which holds that aspirations such as personal growth, close relationships, and community contribution tend to satisfy basic psychological needs, whereas pursuits of wealth, fame, and image offer only contingent satisfactions. The present findings suggest that the family is one setting where this goal orientation is calibrated long before individuals make deliberate choices about their priorities.

It is also worth noting that value transmission in families is rarely a one-way street. Research on parent-child value similarity indicates that children actively filter, negotiate, and sometimes reject what parents offer, and that perceived norms within the family shape whether parental messages are heard as genuine convictions or as mere expectations. The democratic climate in this study may function precisely as such a channel, giving children enough access to parental reasoning to reconstruct materialistic values as their own.

Future work could follow families over time, incorporate both parents’ and children’s reports, and test whether these dynamics hold across cultures with differing levels of consumer development, questions the authors’ data-sharing statement should help address.

Subject of Research: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article Title: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article References: Lins, S., Caria, M. A., & de Melo, C. F. (2026). Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Keywords: Materialistic, Heritage, Influence, Parental, Figures, Children, Life, Goals, scientific research