Previous studies on children from military families have emphasized military-specific environmental factors-such as frequent residential mobility, remote-duty assignments, and experiences of separation from parents-as key mechanisms contributing to ch...
Previous studies on children from military families have emphasized military-specific environmental factors-such as frequent residential mobility, remote-duty assignments, and experiences of separation from parents-as key mechanisms contributing to children’s maladjustment. However, recent advances in transportation and communication technologies have substantially altered the developmental context of children from military families by reducing geographic isolation and enhancing psychological connectedness. In light of these changes, it is necessary to reexamine whether challenges previously identified in military families persist or have taken on different forms in contemporary contexts. From this perspective, the present study analyzed the structural relationships among children’s perceived parenting attitudes, social-emotional competence, and school adjustment, compared these relationships between children from military and non-military families, and further explored the relative contributions of parenting attitudes and social-emotional competence in predicting school adjustment within each group. The participants were 729 students, including 256 children from military families and 473 children from non-military families, enrolled in the 5th and 6th grades of elementary school and the 1st and 2nd grades of middle school. Data were collected through self-report questionnaires and analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 28.0. Descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM) were conducted. The significance of indirect effects was tested using bootstrapping procedures, and hierarchical regression analyses were subsequently performed. The results were as follows. First, SEM results indicated that positive parenting attitudes significantly and positively predicted social-emotional competence, which in turn had a significant positive effect on school adjustment. These findings supported a structural pathway in which social-emotional competence fully mediated the association between positive parenting attitudes and school adjustment. In contrast, negative parenting attitudes did not significantly predict social-emotional competence but exerted a direct negative effect on school adjustment, demonstrating a pattern distinct from pathways mediated by social-emotional competence. These structural relationships were largely similar across groups in the multi-group analysis; however, the direct negative effect of negative parenting attitudes on school adjustment was statistically significant only among children from non-military families. Second, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that social-emotional competence was a core predictor of school adjustment in both groups. Specifically, in both groups, female students and those with higher self-perceived academic achievement exhibited higher levels of school adjustment, and among children from non-military families, elementary school students demonstrated higher levels of school adjustment than middle school students. In contrast, the number of school transfers did not significantly predict school adjustment in either group. With regard to parenting attitudes, neither positive nor negative parenting attitudes showed significant predictive power in the final model including social-emotional competence among children from military families, whereas among children from non-military families, coercive negative parenting attitudes negatively predicted school adjustment. At the level of social-emotional competence subdomains, relationship management competence and community competence significantly predicted school adjustment in both groups; additionally, self-management competence was significant among children from military families, whereas relationship awareness competence was significant among children from non-military families. The findings indicate that social-emotional competence functions as a key mediating mechanism linking positive parenting attitudes and school adjustment. Although structural similarities between children from military and non-military families were observed at the overall model level-indicating that pronounced group differences reported in earlier studies were not evident-the analysis of specific predictors revealed that the social-emotional competencies most strongly associated with school adjustment may vary depending on environmental context. These results underscore the importance of a multilayered approach that considers contextual conditions and developmental demands in understanding school adjustment among children and adolescents.