BECE. Newsletter 

Vol.10, No.2, 2022 1417 

 

 

 

 

The Impact of Parents’ Marital Quality on Children’s 

Prosocial Behavior 

By Wang, S. L., Zhao, B. X., Wu, H., & Zhao, W. 
Correspondence to: Hong Wu, College of Teacher Education, Guizhou Normal 

University. E-mail: wuhong@gznu.edu.cn 

UBLISHED in Psychological Development and Education, the study 

attempts to explore the relation between children’s prosocial behavior 

and parents’ marital quality, emotional expression, and parenting behavior. 

The research uses the couples’ adaptation scale, parental emotional expres-

sion scale, parenting behavior scale and strength scale to investigate 442 par-

ents of school-age children in grades 1-6 from two schools in a city in 

Guizhou Province. The findings are shown as follows. 

 Parents’ marriage quality is significantly and positively correlated 

with children’s prosocial behavior. However, the direct relation 

between parents’ marriage quality and children’s prosocial behav-

ior is not significant when mediating variables included, which 

indicates that the relation may not be independent and needs to be 

moderated by other conditions. 

 Parents’ positive emotional expression and parental acceptance 

and company play intermediary roles between parents’ marriage 

quality and the children’s prosocial behavior, through three in-

termediary paths: the independent mediation of parental positive 

emotional expression, the independent mediation of parental 

company and acceptance, and the chain mediation of parents’ 

positive emotional expression- parental company and acceptance. 

 There are gender differences in the chain mediation of parents’ 

positive emotional expression- parental acceptance and company. 

The mediation of parents’ positive emotional expression works 

among both boys and girls, with a greater effect for the group of 

girls, whereas the mediation of parental acceptance and compan-

ion only works for the boy group, which may stem from the dif-

ferences in children’s personal factors and parenting behavior. 

The study also proposes several suggestions: First, parents should 

adopt constructive strategies to improve the quality of their marriage and in-

crease intimacy. Second, they are supposed to develop a disposition of posi-

tive emotional expression at home and provide emotional behavior para-

P 

mailto:wuhong@gznu.edu.cn


 

Vol.10, No.2, 2022 1418 

digms such as love, reciprocity, and cooperation for family members in order 

to cultivate children’s prosocial motivations and behaviors. Third, they 

should exert both rigorousness and tolerance in parenting behavior to help 

children learn rules and regulations, develop empathy, build interpersonal 

trust, and show more prosocial behavior. Finally, parents should keep pace 

with the times, learn more scientific gender education knowledge, and im-

prove their personality and gender education skills. 

 

Source: Psychological Development and Education,2022; 2022(3):1-8.