BACKGROUND: The delivery of the Council of Europe Recommendation 2006/19 on Policies to Promote Positive Parenting brought about the development of Positive Parenting programmes. Identifying how parents perceive their parenting competences before enrolling a programme is key to detect parenting needs as well as to analyze programme effectiveness. This applies specially to mothers, who, according to research, are the ones more frequently involved in parenting tasks (Martínez-González & Rodríguez-Ruiz, 2007; Symeou, Martínez-González & Álvarez-Blanco, 2012). The objective of this paper is to present the technical features of the Emotional and Social Parenting Competence Scale-ESPCS designed to identify such parental competences. METHOD: ESPCS content validity was checked by experts in the field and applied to a Spanish random sample of 2.437 mothers with children from 0 up to 18 years old. The structure of the questionnaire was analysed through exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis. The internal consistency (reliability) was verified by Cronbach’s Alpha Index. In a second step, analysis of the questionnaire was made only with data from mothers of adolescents given the challenging characteristics of this evolutive stage. RESULTS: ESPCS resolves around five factors when applied with mothers of children from 0 to up 18 years old, explaining 60.25% of the variance. An optimal level of internal consistency was found for the total scale (Cronbach's α=0.62). Better adjustment was found when analysing mothers of adolescents’ data: 63.49% of variance explained, Cronbach's α=0.70 for the total scale with only four factors. CONCLUSIONS AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: ESPCS has adequate psychometric properties to be applied to assess mothers' perception of their emotional parenting competences. It can be used with mothers of children with a wide range of ages -from 0 to up 18 years old- and especially with mothers of teenagers. The questionnaire can be worth to analyse how mothers’ emotional parenting competences change after taking part in parenting programmes, thus, contributing to assess parenting programmes effectiveness.

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