Stress is experienced at all ages and individuals of all ages try to cope with it. Developmental perspectives are fundamental to understanding how stress and coping processes change from childhood to old age (Folkman, 2011). Preschool children, like adults, often face stressors that they have to cope with in their daily lives. Each child tries to overcome these stresses by using their own coping strategy (Aldwin & Yancura, 2011). However, an important point is that there are qualitative differences between children's and adults' coping methods, and the same coping behavior may have different functions in children (Röder et al., 2002). For example, a crying child may seem to use emotion-oriented coping methods when distressed. However, children's crying may also be aimed at attracting the attention of adults who can solve the problem causing distress. Because the child's coping strategy in such a case is aimed at attracting attention, it is rated as problem-focused coping, in contrast to adult coping (Rudolph et al., 1995). Similarly, Amirkhan and Auyeung (2007) suggested that young children's behavior of imagining how events might be different may be a coping strategy (Amirkhan & Auyeung, 2007). In other words, the coping skills identified for adults may not be sufficient to define children's coping strategies (Yeo et al., 2014). Therefore, research on the coping process in children is important in terms of understanding the subject. It is considered important to investigate the development of coping behaviors at this age, especially since there are many developmental turning points in early childhood (Trawick-Smith, 2022). According to Compass et al. (2017), one major issue with current broad measures of coping and emotion regulation is that they are little informative of what children and adolescents do to cope with stress (Compas et al., 2017). Contrary to the studies on coping in adults in the literature, there are a limited number of studies on the coping skills of preschool children. In parallel with the above information, different categorizations from adults regarding the coping strategies used by preschool children are noteworthy in these studies. For example, Deans, Frydenberg, and Tsurutani (2010) found that children aged 4–5 years can express 36 different coping responses, some of which had not been previously defined (Deans et al., 2010). In a study conducted by Blair, Denham, Kochanoff, and Whipple (2004), the coping strategies of preschool children were categorized into three categories: constructive coping (e.g., ‘talking to someone to find solutions’), emotional expression (e.g., ‘using verbal and physical aggression to release emotions’), and passive coping (e.g., ‘denial’). This categorization includes three coping strategies, one positive and two negatives (Blair et al., 2004). The Children's Coping Scale-Revised Form (CCS-R), adapted to Turkish culture within the scope of this study, addresses coping in three categories, one positive and two negative, similar to the classification of Blair et al. (2004).

Identifying coping strategies is important for developing skills to use effective methods and thus reduce the negative consequences caused by stress. Health professionals and educators who work with 4–5 year old children need to know children's coping strategies in order to understand them and to provide developmentally appropriate care and education approaches. However, in the literature review conducted by the researchers, a limited number of measurement tools were found to determine the strategies for coping with stress in preschool children in Turkish culture. In Turkish culture, there was a need to adapt a measurement tool to Turkish that would comprehensively assess coping skills, since existing measurement tools that assess coping in children address coping with a small number of items and in a single dimension under scales such as psychological resilience (Saltalı et al., 2018) and validity and reliability studies have not been conducted comprehensively (Eyüpoğlu, 2006).

It was thought that filling this gap in the literature was important for studies to be conducted in Turkish culture in the preschool age group, a period when emotional development is very rapid. For this purpose, measurement tools that evaluate the stress coping skills of preschool children in different cultures were scanned by researchers. In these scans, many measurement tools that evaluate the coping skills of preschool children in different countries were reached (Bagdi & Pfister, 2006; Deans et al., 2010; Halpern, 2004; Moreland & Dumas, 2008; Saunders et al., 1999; Yeo et al., 2014).

Among these measurement tools, it was decided to adapt the revised version of the CCS-R by Yeo et al. (2004) to Turkish culture. The reasons why CCS-R is preferred can be listed as follows. The CCS-R includes a comprehensive assessment of preschool children’ coping skills. It assesses coping in preschool children based on parental judgment. CCS-R is a measurement tool that has a small number of items (26 items), is easy to fill out (with 3-point Likert-type evaluation), and includes three sub-dimensions (similar to the classification of Blair et al., 2004). Therefore, in this study, we aimed to adapt the CCS-R, which was developed to determine the coping strategies of preschool children, to Turkish culture and to conduct a psychometric evaluation in terms of translation, cross-cultural adaptation, reliability, validity and measurement invariance on a sample of parents of preschool children.