Abstract
Guided by family systems theory and the parenting process model, this study aimed to identify distinct profiles of parenting stress and examine their associations with parental characteristics, social-contextual factors, and child factors. A sample of 303 parents of preschool children (52.5% boys, mean child age = 61.17 months) from six urban kindergartens in southern and northern China participated in this study. Latent profile analysis (LPA) identified four distinct parenting stress profiles: the low parenting stress profile (12.9%), middle parenting stress profile (39.3%), high parenting stress profile (40.6%), and very high parenting stress profile (7.2%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that these profiles were significantly associated with parenting self-efficacy, the parent-grandparent co-parenting relationship, the co-parenting structure, family income, and the child's gender. These findings advance our understanding of the heterogeneity of parenting stress within Chinese parent-grandparent co-parenting families and offer theoretical and practical implications for future research and the development of targeted family support interventions.