The present study is a two-year investigation to examine the relationships among parental life stress, parental self esteem, parental marital satisfaction, and parental depression both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Participants are married, middle-aged parents from the midwest farm belt;Multiple regression was conducted to analyze the data. The cross-sectional results indicated that parental life stress increased parental depression and decreased parental self-esteem and parental marital satisfaction. Parental self-esteem and parental marital satisfaction did function as mediating variables between parental life stress and parental depression. Self-esteem was associated with marital satisfaction for mothers but not for fathers;The results of longitudinal data analyses did not show any strong relationships between wave one variables and wave two variables except in the case of auto-regressions. A major limitation of the present study is that all the information was based on self-reports.