A Systematic Review of Parental Self-efficacy Among Parents of School-Age Children and Adolescents

What function does parental self-efficacy have for parenting behaviors and children’s adjustment, and what explains individual variations in parents’ self-efficacy? Parental self-efficacy involves parents’ beliefs about their influence on their children and this systematic review presents results from 35 empirical studies published between 2003 and 2022 among parents of school-aged children and adolescents. First, the studies in this review show a bi-directional association between parental self-efficacy and positive parenting, and some empirical evidence that parental self-efficacy influences children indirectly, via parenting. The few longitudinal studies examining associations between parental self-efficacy and child behaviors suggest that self-efficacy might emerge as a reaction to children’s behaviors. Second, many child, parent, and sociocultural factors were shown to predict parental self-efficacy (e.g., child gender and age, parents’ psychological well-being, and socio-economic status), and results suggest that these associations are similar across multiple countries and age groups. Finally, studies reporting on parental self-efficacy at different time points or a correlation between self-efficacy and the child’s age suggested that parental self-efficacy decreases over the school-age and adolescent period. This review shows the complex role of parental self-efficacy in associations with parent and child factors, and it also highlight questions to address for future research.