Peer-reviewed article

COVID-19 Preventive Practices, Parent-Child Conflict, and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese Adolescents.

Zhou T, Xu L, Bian X, Wei L, Liu J · 15 Sept 2026

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected adolescent mental health. However, the concurrent associations among adolescents' preventive practices, parent-child conflict, and depressive symptoms during the initial lockdown remain unclear. This cross-sectional study included 2558 adolescents (48.75% girls; M age = 13.06 years) from Zhengzhou, China, of whom 2543 were included in the analytic sample after cases missing age or class identifiers were excluded. All focal constructs were assessed once by adolescent self-report. Latent moderated mediation analyses showed that preventive practices were directly and negatively associated with depressive symptoms. A significant indirect association was observed through parent-child conflict such that greater engagement in preventive practices co-occurred with less parent-child conflict and fewer depressive symptoms. The negative direct association between preventive practices and depressive symptoms was stronger for boys, whereas the positive association between parent-child conflict and depressive symptoms was stronger for girls. However, these interaction terms added only ΔR2 = 0.003 and 0.004 in observed-score sensitivity models and were not statistically significant in the subsample sensitivity analysis. These findings identify parent-child conflict as a concurrent correlate of the association between preventive practices and depressive symptoms during the pandemic.