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• Parental investment and skill mediate caregiver mental health and child development. • Caregiver depression are more harmful to parenting practices and child development. • The variety of play material has significant mediation effect on child development. • Coercive parenting mediate caregiver mental health and child development. Parenting practices are associated with early childhood development (ECD), and some evidences suggest that mental health might affect parenting practices. However, the interrelationships of mental health, parenting practices, and ECD outcomes have not yet been well documented in developing contexts like rural China. This paper aims to investigate the interrelationships between the caregiver's mental health, parenting practices, and the child's ECD outcomes in rural China. A total of 1787 sample households in an undeveloped rural area of western China are enrolled in the study. A socioeconomic questionnaire, the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, the Family Care Indicators, the Parent and Family Adjustment Scales, and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development version III were used to measure the socioeconomic characteristics of sample households, the caregiver's mental health, parental investments and parenting skills, and the child's development outcomes, respectively. Mediation model was then applied to estimate the interrelationships. The results showed that parental practices significantly mediated between the caregiver's mental health and the child's cognition, language, motor, and social–emotion development. Through parental investments, one standard deviation increases in the caregiver's mental health test score was associated with the decline in the child's four development scores by 0.6% standard deviation, respectively. Through parenting skills, one standard deviation increases in the caregiver's mental health test score was associated with the decline in the child's language and social-emotional score by 2% and 5% standard deviation, respectively. Different dimensions of caregiver mental health, parental investments and skills played heterogeneous roles in the interrelationships. Early interventions aimed at improving the caregiver's mental health, parental investments and skills are important and might be effective to improve early childhood development in rural China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand rural–urban differences in stressors, this study compared the cognitive and emotional language in geolocated Twitter posts in the United States against survey-reported county-level trends from the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index. Mentions of stress on Twitter can predict population-level trends in stress in both rural (R2=31.6%) and urban (R2=26.7%) communities. While mentions of poor health are limited to only rural areas with low socioeconomic status, higher emotional expression is associated with higher stress across all rural communities. Controlling for socioeconomic status, urban communities reporting higher stress are also more likely to discuss relationships on Twitter. The findings contribute to an understanding of how language use on social media acts as a barometer of the social and cultural differences between regions. The data and stress topics developed in this paper are publicly available and can be accessed at https://osf.io/af8ce/. • Methods to derive data-driven dictionaries from social media, validated against survey data on community-level outcomes. • Social media mentions of stress discuss appraisal, problems, and coping processes aligning with psychological theory. • Controlling for socioeconomic status, rural areas with higher stress are more emotionally expressive on Twitter. • Controlling for socioeconomic status, urban areas with higher stress are more likely to discuss relationships on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]