The association between parenting style and children's loneliness after the COVID-19 pandemic: the mediating role of meaning in life.

Strict lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic altered patterns of social interaction, leading to increased social isolation and heightened levels of loneliness in the post-pandemic era. However, it remains unclear whether children continue to experience elevated loneliness after the pandemic's official end. Loneliness represents a prominent negative emotional state among children, is associated with various adverse outcomes, and warrants particular attention in the current post-pandemic context. Parenting constitutes a key familial factor that profoundly influences children's psychological development and social adaptation. Grounded in the Social, Economic, and Cultural Framework and the Distal-Structural-Proximal Model, this study examined the association between parenting style and children's loneliness after the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the potential mediating role of meaning in life. A total of 446 elementary school students participated in the study on 16 June 2023. The results indicated that the children's level of loneliness was below the medium level and that loneliness was negatively associated with positive parenting and positively associated with negative parenting. Moreover, meaning in life significantly mediated the relationship between positive parenting and loneliness but not between negative parenting and loneliness. These findings advance our understanding of the complex interplay among parenting, meaning in life, and loneliness and offer practical implications for parenting interventions aimed at supporting children's psychological adjustment in the post-pandemic era.