Daily stress refers to daily and frustrating environmental demands that can have a significant relevance on health due to their cumulative impact (Kanner et al., 1981), the latter depending on an individual’s perception of his or her life.

In addition, Zarit et al. (2014) refer that daily or daily stress has an immediate effect on emotional and physical functioning through the accumulation of residual effects throughout the days, leading to overload and adverse outcomes such as clinical depression, negative emotional reactivity (Parrish et al., 2011), and increased health problems. It has also been associated with family and social difficulties (Hamer et al., 2009; Van der Wal et al., 2003), bullying (Bai et al., 2017) , and may also have an impact on increased C-reactive protein, as well as inflammatory responses across the lifespan (Gouin et al., 2012) and cortisol levels (Slatcher & Robles, 2012). Childhood adversity may predispose individuals with high neurobiological sensitivity to use maladaptive coping strategies (Hagan et al., 2017).

It has been found that children with adverse childhood situations tend to report more stressful events throughout later life, which has been associated with depression in adulthood (Arpawong et al., 2022).

Wu et al. (2021) suggest that daily stressors predict behavioral problems moderated by gender and age. Both family functioning and classroom environment moderated the relationship between daily stressors and conduct problems. Family functioning and favorable classroom environments may help reduce conduct problems (Wu et al., 2021).

In this regard, Burkhart et al. (2017) note that most empirical work examining stress in children focus on significant life events such as parental divorce, and very few studies consider the role of daily stressors or routine day-to-day challenges whereas some of them concentrate on daily stress in children who are ill, disabled, or facing significant risks. While these findings are based on retrospective reports or parent or teacher reports of stressors experienced by children, few examine the role of stress on mood and health. Those authors conducted a study exploring daily experiences of stress, moods, and health symptoms over five consecutive days in 25 children. They categorized daily stressors into:

The most common stressors in the children were performance-related, control-related, and interpersonal factors. The stressful events that children reported over the five days were related to the number of aches and pains, low energy, and feeling tired. Cold symptoms were positively correlated with perceived stress control. Interpersonal stressors were positively correlated with negative mood.

In addition, Slatcher and Robles (2012) found that daily conflicts at home may be critical in the relationship between stress and healthy development in young children, concluding that daily conflicts in preschoolers predict less healthy daytime cortisol rhythms. Finally, Frydenberg (2017) refers as the main areas of stress in preschoolers’ uncertainty, fear of abandonment, sadness at not having friends, fear of not having friends, and fear of being punished by parents.

Some scales to measure children’s daily stress used in Latin America are the Inventory of Daily Stressors for Children aged 8 to 12 years (Trianes et al., 2009) with three factors: health, school, and family. The Children’s Stress Scale (Lucio et al., 2020) has eight factors: lack of family acceptance, verbal aggression and teasing, lack of trust and respect, school pressure, family demands, scolding and punishment, family conflicts, and fears. The Daily Stress Scale in Scholars in Chile (Encina Agurto and Ávila Muñoz, 2015) has three factors: academic stress, relational violence stress, and environmental stress.

In the Mexican preschool population, there is the Daily Stress Scale in preschoolers (Monjarás Rodríguez & Lucio Gómez Maqueo, 2018), which has six dimensions in the first exploratory factorial analysis: stress in the relationship with parents, in the relationship with siblings, environmental, school, associated with fantasies, and due to punishments; said scale is pictorial and is answered by preschoolers (Cronbach’s alpha = .848).

Most studies on stressors in children have also relied on parent and/or teacher reports of stressors experienced by children, although research has shown that children can identify daily events and activities that are stressful and distress or upset them (Muldoon, 2003).

To plan interventions aimed at reducing daily stress, which in turn reduces behavioral problems, it is necessary to evaluate the main areas of daily stress in children, specifically in preschoolers, where research is scarce. For this reason, it is considered that for the evaluation of child behavior it is essential to have multiple informants and not only with the children’s report (Sarmento-Henrique et al., 2016); it is for this reason that the aim of this research was to obtain the psychometric properties the Daily Stress Scale in Preschoolers, version for parents, and also to get the confirmatory model of the children’s version.

The present study had the purpose of adapting the scale of daily stress in preschoolers (Monjarás Rodríguez & Lucio Gomez Maqueo, 2018) to the version for parents, considering that in the evaluation of child behavior it is essential to have multiple informants and not only the report of the children (Sarmento et al., 2016); having the report of both the child and the parents contributes to knowing the perception of the latter and their children concerning stress in the preschool stage. In this regard different investigations have been seen where parents or caregivers tend to over-report their children’s problems, highlighting that communication, relationship between them, and difficulties in parenting can influence this (Davidson, 2005; Dell, 2014; Vann, 2018).

For the clinical psychologist, it is essential to understand both the parent’s and the child’s perceptions and analyze the factors involved in the discrepancy or agreement to propose a treatment plan.

Considering the above, the aforementioned scale was adapted, obtaining five stress factors, as in the confirmatory factor analysis of the version for children.

The first factor is related to stress due to fantasies and fears, such as fear of the dark, ugly dreams, ghosts, etc. In this regard, it is important to say that at this stage this is often a stress factor, and it has also been seen that these fears and fantasies are directly related to the development of cognition and beliefs that are socially transmitted (Coelho et al., 2021).

The second factor refers to the stress associated with conflict with peers, for example, being hit or bullied by their peers. At this stage, they begin to acquire socialization skills and sometimes may have difficulties in setting limits; if these difficulties are not identified, children could be targets of harassment by other children (bullying), which has been seen to have consequences at the psychological level in the self-concept, being this devalued, in addition to impacting the motivation and learning of children (Morales-Ramírez & Villalobos-Cordero, 2017).

The third factor is related to sibling conflict, and studies indicate that behavior problems of older children have a significant negative relationship with the quality of the relationship between siblings. In comparison, behavior problems in younger children have a positive relationship with family stress (Merino & Martínez-Pampliega, 2020). One of the variables associated with sibling conflict is the personality and temperament of both siblings, insecure attachment, and parental differences in the treatment and discipline of one of the children (Dunn, 2002).

The fourth factor is related to conflicts at school, mainly punishment by their teachers, not having friends and being teased. Some studies highlight that the main stressors concerning school in students aged 13 to 14 years are teachers’ attitudes towards students, described as abusive, conflicts with classmates, meetings between parents and teachers, and evaluations (Piekarska, 2000). In preschoolers, stressors are stress from punishment or teacher scolding, not feeling included in a group, and being teased seems to stand out the most.

The fifth factor is conflict in relation to parents, being scolded, hit, and seeing them fight, which is related to what Slatcher and Robles (2012) mentioned, who state that daily conflict in the home increases stress and is related to physical, emotional, and behavioral health problems.

Unlike the scales reported in schoolchildren where the main areas of stress are lack of family acceptance, verbal aggression, and teasing, lack of trust and respect, school pressure, family demands, scolding and punishment, family conflicts and fears (Lucio et al., 2020), in preschoolers we only found five factors.

Continuing with the above, knowing the areas of stress in Mexican preschoolers provides important data to establish intervention guideline. It is important to highlight that in other research with schoolchildren stressors related to school, violence, and family conflicts have been associated with somatic complaints in children, who in turn are associated with internalized and externalized problems (Hart et al., 2013). In Mexican preschoolers, the main areas of daily stress are fantasies and fears, conflict with peers, conflict with siblings, conflict at school, and conflict in the relationship with parents, the above contrasting with what was mentioned by Frydenberg (2017), who reports as main areas of stress uncertainty, fear of abandonment, sadness at not having friends, fear of not having friends, fear of being punished by parents; it seems that in Mexico children from 3 to 6 years of age are immersed in daily stressors, related to violence and conflict, which may be associated with the country’s current context.

There are few studies on daily stress scales in preschoolers. There are some in children from 8 to 12 years old, some areas match with the reports of preschoolers, for example, fears, verbal aggression and teasing, school stress, family conflicts, violence (Encina Agurto & Ávila Muñoz, 2015; Lucio et al., 2020; Trianes et al., 2009), but a difference is that preschoolers report stress related to fantasies that are linked to their developmental stage. That is why it is important to evaluate variables, such as daily stress, at each developmental stage since the experience of a 4-year-old is not the same as that of a 9-year-old.

Among the limitations found in the present study, there is a lack of convergent and divergent reliability, which is suggested to be done in other studies, as well as to contrast the validity of the scale in different countries.