Sharing Good Times and Recovering from Difficult Moments: Development and Validation of the Parenting Joy Scale

<p>Existing parenting measures primarily focus on the challenges and negative feelings of parenting, however there is a growing interest in developing scales that capture positive experiences. Two distinctly positive aspects of parenting are feelings of joy and happiness in the good times, and renewed closeness, comfort, and security when difficult moments are repaired. The Parenting Joy Scale (PJS; Moretti et al., 2026) was developed as a 16-item caregiver-report measure that captures two dimensions of positive experiences of parenting: Mutual Fun/Enjoyment (8 items) and Repair/Reunion (8 items). Across a clinical (N = 306) and a community sample (N = 152), confirmatory factor analyses supported this two-factor structure. Further, scalar invariance held across samples. Associations with attachment insecurity, parenting, and youth mental health situated the scale within a coherent nomological network. The PJS provides a foundation for testing developmentally contextualized and theoretically driven questions about what promotes the emergence of each parenting facet alone or in combination and their impacts on parent and child wellbeing and the quality of parent–child relationships.</p>