Developmental Trajectories of Symptom-Specific Anxiety in Chinese Preschoolers: The Role of Maternal Anxious Rearing Behaviors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1.       The specific manuscript presents an extremely important issue which concentrates on early childhood

2.       It is interesting to understand few things about the China, however I believe that authors need to explain the significance of the study internationally as well. We are talking about an international journal and the audience needs to understand the framework in China and the extensions internationally.

3.       The presentation of the theoretical framework is well structured and well established.

4.       Excellent presentation of the methodology.

5.       Excellent presentation of the results. However authors need to explain few more things for the readers who do not know the details of those types of analyses

6.       Authors could discuss and explain further the unexpected results.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your advice.

    We completely agreed with you that the manuscript should highlight international contributions of study findings. In the revised manuscript, we have modified some expressions in the Abstract, Introduction, and Discussion part to highlight that this study is the first to provide a description of the developmental trajectories of various specific anxiety symptoms during early childhood all over the world (not only in China). In addition, we took Chinese context as an example to show that it's valuable to investigate the early development of anxiety symptoms in a specific cultural background.

    We tried to keep the Result part as concise as possible to reduce readers' reading burden. Instead, we introduced our method of data analysis in details in 2.4 data analysis to help readers better understand our method of data analysis.

    Our unexpected results include the insignificant association between some types of anxiety symptoms and maternal anxious rearing behaviors at some time points. In the revised manuscript, we gave explanations from the prospectives of the normative challenges at different stages of early childhood, and children’s learning and living circumstances in specific cultural contexts (i.e., Chinese context in this study).

Reviewer 2 Report

In the introduction, the claims for significance could be strengthened if you could state directly how what you have done in your study has addressed the limitations of the studies that you have pointed out in the literature review. 

Please explain the sampling method of the participants. 

Please explain (justify) the suitability of PAS for your study. Why this instrument and not others?

I suggest setting the limitations and conclusion off in two sub-sections for readability. 

What are the implications of this study? I would like to have a paragraph that deals directly with implications for research and/or child-rearing or other related fields. As it sits now I do not see this too clearly in the paper. 

Other minor issues:

Some of the fonts for the citations are in superscript.  These should be changed to normal font sizes. 

"makes u know little" - rephrase "makes us"

"Battaglia and colleague" (colleagues?) If only one, why not name the name? if more than one, use the plural.  

(2016 = (2016)

"Table 1 showed" = Table 1 shows

Formatting of Table 1 currently makes the numbers a bit difficult to read.

"Table 2 showed" = Table 2 shows

"Table 3 showed" = Table 3 shows

Do not use contractions in academic papers - example "didn't" should be did not

"Special fear was found significantly decrease" = "Special feature was found to significantly decrease"

Author Response

Thank you very much for your advice. According to your advice, we have highlighted how this study can address research gaps in the Introduction parts (the end of paragraph 2, 4 and the final paragraph). 

We also clarified why we used the PAS for measuring child anxiety symptoms and explain our sampling method in the Method part (2.1 participants and 2.3.2 child anxiety symptoms).

We also modified the structure of the Discussion part to highlight the  limitations and implications of this study (5. Limitations and future studies; 6. Implications). 

All minor errors you mentioned have been modified. We also checked the expressions of the whole manuscripts to minimise typo errors.

Reviewer 3 Report

The studio theme is the result of interest

In the Abstract, it would be of interest to present the measuring instruments and the procedure

the introduction is ok

In the section of participants in the deberia de indicate "No significant difference was found in demographic and study variables between the longitudinal sample and attrition sample"

The procedure section is suitable

The Measure section is well explained

the analysis section is understood well

The results section is ok, the tables are ok and the discussions are ok

I recommend to the authors to see these works, without doubt they will be useful in the face of their discussions

Simón-Piqueras, J.Á.; Prieto-Ayuso, A.; Gómez-Moreno, E.; Martínez-López, M.; Gil-Madrona, P. Evaluation of a Program of Aquatic Motor Games in the Improvement of Motor Competence in Children from 4 to 5 Years Old. Children 2022, 9, 1141. https://doi.org/10.3390/children9081141

Gil-Madrona P, Romero-Martínez SJ and Roz-Faraco CC (2021) Extracurricular Physical Activities and the Condition of Being an Only Child as a Conditioning Factor in the Psychomotor Development of 5-Year-Old Children. Front. Pediatr. 9:684418. doi: 10.3389/fped.2021.684418

Author Response

Thank you very much for your advice. We have added measure instruments and produce in the revised manuscript. The papers you shared are very helpful. We have addressed some expressions in the Discussion part to better explain our studies findings and implications