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.

Military families with young children face unique psychological and relational challenges during reintegration because of attachment disruption. This can increase psychological stress for service members. We examined three phases of the deployment cycle: predeployment, deployment, and reinte gration to reveal risk and resilience factors that may impede or promote attachment relationships. We also explored the impact of predeployment preparation and deployment communication on service members' parenting stress at reintegration. We conducted (N = 30) semistructured interviews with fathers who were deployed within 2 years of the study, and whose youngest child was 6 years old or younger during the deployment. We found that military fathers whose families did not have preparation strategies for maintaining father-child relationship during the deployment experienced more parenting stress after the deployment than did fathers whose families did use preparation strategies. All participants reportedly communicated with their children during deployment, although number of communication methods did not predict later parenting stress. The most common reintegration experiences were described as an adjustment period, parental stress, and time off of work. Strategies for building attachment as a means of promoting resilience throughout the deployment cycle are identified and discussed.

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Research shows that lower negative reintegration attitudes relate to lower levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among service members. Furthermore, mission preparedness has been shown to buffer the effects of combat exposure on PTSD development. The current study aims to extend the preparedness for deployment research into the family domain by examining the effect of predeployment childfocused preparedness on military fathers' reintegration attitudes and PTSD symptoms. Correlations were conducted to examine the relationship between predeployment child-focused preparedness, reintegration attitudes, and PTSD symptoms among military fathers with young children (N ϭ 30). Findings indicate that preparing one's young children prior to deployment is positively related to fathers' less negative reintegration attitudes following the deployment. Additionally, participants who engaged in predeployment child-focused preparation were significantly less likely to meet the clinical cut-off for PTSD compared to those who did not engage in any preparation for their young children. Implications for the potential positive impact of predeployment childfocused preparation on the family system are discussed, particularly as a buffer against PTSD among reintegrating service members.