Assessing Parenting Stress: Review of the Use and Interpretation of the Parental Stress Scale

Parenting stress is a cross-cultural concept and is impacted by specific family and life circumstances. Parenting stress is amplified by challenging life situations including poverty, single parenting, and parental separation, but parenting stress is counteracted by the inherent benefits of parenting including intrinsic feelings of warmth and love. The Parental Stress Scale (PSS) was created in 1995 to measure stress unique to parenting and captures both the joys and demands of parenting. The current study reviews two decades of research that incorporated the PSS. We present descriptive data from published studies that all used the same parenting stress measure and provide cross-study comparisons. The studies we review evidence diverse use of the PSS in eight countries and PSS translation into four languages. This review is intended to aid future researchers with interpretation of relative differences in descriptive statistics of parenting stress by providing descriptive data from different samples worldwide.