Parental locus of control and early childhood development: Evidence on parent and grandparent caregivers in rural China

COVID‐19 school closures and Chinese children's school readiness: Results from the natural experimental data

“…We found that internal PLOC was positively related to school readiness scores, while external PLOC was negatively associated with school readiness scores. These findings are consistent with the general belief that parenting behaviours that reflect confidence, efficacy and competence are associated with favourable child outcomes (Amirazizi et al, 2023;Iruka et al, 2018;Vance & Brandon, 2017), as well as the literature regarding the implications of PLOC for school readiness skills in normal times (Bai et al, 2022;Lekfuangfu et al, 2018).…”

“…It is common for PLOC to be conceptualized as an external-internal spectrum in the existing literature (e.g., Bai et al, 2022;Lekfuangfu et al, 2018). In our study, we stayed closely with the two-dimension definition based on the fact that internal PLOC and external PLOC were very weakly correlated (r = −.06, p < .05).…”

“…PLOC is related to young children's school readiness during normal times (Bai et al, 2022;Lekfuangfu et al, 2018). For instance, in a recent study involving 995 Chinese children under 3 years old and their caregivers (i.e., parents or grandparents), Bai et al (2022) found that a higher level of caregiver internal PLOC was associated with more favourable cognitive, social-emotional and physical development in children. During the COVID-19 school closures, meeting young children's learning and daily needs contributed to increased parenting stress (Li et al, 2022;Skjerdingstad et al, 2022).…”

“…In Study 1, we used a slightly modified Chinese translation of the 24-item PLOC scale (Bai et al, 2022) to obtain parents' perceptions of how much control they have in different child-rearing situations. The 24-item PLOC (Hassall et al, 2005) includes 12 items measuring external PLOC (e.g., 'What I do has little effect on my child's behaviour') and 12 items measuring internal PLOC (e.g., 'I always feel in control when it comes to my child'), which were rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Not Sure, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree).…”