The Relationship between Family Environment and Children's Mental Health: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis

Chen Ziwei; Jin Juanjuan; Yu Guoliang

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250615

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (6) : 1462-1480. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250615

Research on Social Psychological Service in the New Era

The Relationship between Family Environment and Children's Mental Health: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis

Chen Ziwei¹, Jin Juanjuan², Yu Guoliang³

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Abstract

Children's mental health serves as the foundation and assurance for their positive development. Unfortunately, the state of children's mental health is concerning at present. On the one hand, mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are increasingly prevalent among children. On the other hand, many children are experiencing impaired well-being due to the lack of economic and social resources that family provides. Consequently, it is imperative to prioritize the maintenance of children's mental health. Family is the central environment of children's positive development. It provides both long-term and immediate care and support, and affects children's emotion, cognition, and behavior, which is crucial for promoting children's mental health. However, a review of existing literature reveals significant variability in research findings regarding the relationship between family environment and children's mental health, largely attributable to ambiguous definitions of family environment and confounding variables. Furthermore, there is a lack of comparative analysis on comparison of the effects of different family environment factors on children's mental health, leaving their relative significance unclear. In this study, the family environment was distinctly delineated, encompassing both the physical and psychological dimensions, with family socioeconomic status and parenting style identified as indicators. Based on the dual-factor model, depression and anxiety were identified as negative indicators of mental health, while well-being was selected as a positive indicator. Three-level meta-analysis and relative weight analysis were used to analyze the influence and relative importance of physical and psychological environment on children's mental health.
A three-level meta-analysis was employed to comprehensively assess the relationships between family environments (family socioeconomic status and parenting style) and children's mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, and well-being) along with moderating factors influencing these relationships. Considering that several countries have introduced policies to improve the family environment to maintain children's mental health since 2010, the literature search period for this study was from January 2010 to December 2023. The literature search database included Web of Science, Psych INFO, Eric, Psych Articles, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, CNKI, and Masters and Doctoral These Database. The search terms of family environment, mental health, and children were combined and searched in the abstract. Besides, relative weight analysis is utilized to ascertain the comparative importance of these two environmental dimensions of family concerning children's mental health outcomes. This study encompassed 316 articles published between 2010 and 2023, with 1,255 effect sizes across 339 independent samples and a total of 712,642 participants aged 0~18.
The findings indicate that: (1) Family socioeconomic status was negatively correlated with depression and anxiety, and positively correlated with happiness. Positive parenting style was negatively correlated with depression and anxiety, and positively correlated with happiness; Conversely, negative parenting styles showed significant positive correlations with both depression/anxiety alongside significant negative correlations with happiness; (2) The relative importance ranking of parenting styles for children's mental health is higher than the family socioeconomic status; (3) Factors such as developmental stage, cultural background, publication year, parenting subject, and type of family socioeconomic status significantly moderated the relationship between family environments and children's mental health.
The results underscore that favorable socioeconomic conditions coupled with positive parenting practices as protective factors for children's mental health whereas negative parenting approaches pose risks. These findings align with the social causation hypothesis, social selection hypothesis, attachment theory, and family systems theory. Besides, the importance of the family psychological environment is stronger than the physical environment. The research analyzed the relative importance of the physical and psychological aspects of family on children's mental health, and discussed the theoretical inconsistence between family socioeconomic status and children's mental health with empirical evidence. At the meantime, the research underscores the critical importance of emotional atmosphere in preserving children's mental health and offers scientific guidance for researchers to formulate objectives and content of family interventions, which holds both theoretical and practical significance.

Key words

children / mental health / family environment / three-level meta-analysis / relative weight analysis

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Chen Ziwei, Jin Juanjuan, Yu Guoliang. The Relationship between Family Environment and Children's Mental Health: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2025, 48(6): 1462-1480 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250615

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