Purpose: This study compared and analyzed the difference of counseling on parent between in-service and pre-service teachers in virtual reality based parent counseling simulations and obtained implications for the development of pre-service teacher curriculum and simulations to enhance parental counseling competency. Methods: Twenty-one in-service teachers with more than 5 years of teaching experience and twenty-one pre-service teachers who had taken a teaching practice had a conversation with a virtual parent and the basic attribute of semantic network analysis, centrality analysis and word-level semantic clustering were conducted. Results: The semantic network of in-service teachers had higher index values such the number of ties, average degree, and density than the network of pre-service teachers. The semantic network of in-service teachers had more words with high degree, closeness, betweenness centralities than the words of pre-service teachers. There was a difference in the context of the keywords used by each group in counseling. Conclusion: Through the difference in the semantic networks, the criteria necessary for the development of parental counseling capabilities of pre-service teachers were prepared.