Families with children faced significant disruptions to their daily lives due to pandemic-related school and childcare closures. This infographic summarizes key findings from the Family Snapshot Reports and shares strategies for supporting families and promoting positive discipline strategies. Parenting through the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging, and family relationships are facing additional stress. In this two-part narrative report, we summarize the statements from a sample of 250 parents and caregivers, randomly selected from nine-thousand survey respondents when asked about the challenges and things that helped during the pandemic.
Impact of COVID‐19 on positive outlook
Some signsof stress are emotional signs (anxiety, frustration, sadness, anger, and confusion),physical signs (such as changes in energy, eating behavior, and sleeping disorder),cognitive signs (such as problem in thinking/worrying, concentration, and memory),and behavioral signs (such as withdrawing socially, arguing, risk-taking, and beingless productive). It is essentialto have good and healthy communication and to find positive activities to dotogether among family members which can build a sense of togetherness, trust,cohesion, and happiness. Policy makers should be advised about the possible consequences for children when household finances can threaten family stability.
- Initially, the response to the pandemic resulted in the closure of many facilities deemed non-essential, which significantly limited access to support networks for families.
- Separate interactions with family and friends are expected to affect each other less as adolescents develop typically.
- Furthermore, research highlights the critical role of social support as a moderating factor in the relationship between COVID-19 stressors and well-being among youth (Szkody et al., 2021).
- If your teen is sulking about being stuck at home with parents and siblings, a direct conversation might be helpful, says Rachel Busman, PsyD, a clinical psychologist.
- To control the disease transmission worldwide, safety measures have been implemented including countrywide lockdown, quarantine, social distancing as well as workplace, school, and university closures.
Financial Domain Predictors
Across all parenting variables, caregivers with depression status reported riskier parenting, with effects sizes ranging from medium to large (Fig 1). The sample on average had high socioeconomic status; however, many were affected financially by the pandemic, including experiences of job loss, receipt government financial support, and difficulty managing unexpected expenses.34 Demographic information is displayed in Table 1. Post-hoc t-test analyses were used to examine the effect size of parenting differences between groups. Bivariate correlations between sociodemographic and household risk variables of interest were examined with parenting variables for inclusion in subsequent inferential analyses. Parental distress was excluded from these analyses because it is largely overlapping with parent depression. Negative parenting strategies were assessed using the Parenting Scale (PS), a 30-item self-report measure of ineffective discipline strategies .
A U.S. National Study of Family Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Prior research with more socioeconomically diverse samples has shown that pandemic-related family hardship undermined family well-being (Gassman-Pines et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2021; Feinberg et al., 2021; Schmeer et al., 2021). Parent’s gender, educational level, race/ethnicity, and number of children in the household did not significantly predict profile membership. Multinomial logistic regression coefficients for financial, marital, psychosocial assets, and child predictors for latent profile membership.
For our approach, the number of children living in the single-parent household was not relevant. Regarding parental education, all three family types show values on the medium ISCED level. At 2025 US Tornadoes and Severe Storms relief the time of the survey, 74% of parents were employed (21% fulltime, 45% parttime, and 8% on reduced hours). We assume that the relations of perceived stress and adaptability are strongest in single-parent families because of the lower personal resources (only one adult within a household) (H2c). What is the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown on adaptability of parents’ HLA in different family types? The negative relation between parental stress and the HLE in general and especially during the first COVID-19 lockdown has already been scientifically proven (Crnic and Greenberg, 1990; Crnic et al., 2005; Oppermann et al., 2021).
Plot comparisons of estimated means and standard errors of four different family functioning profiles during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (May–June 2012). Child age, child gender, parent race/ethnicity, and corresponding T1 SDQ scores were included as covariates. Specifically, financial impact, marital dynamics, psychosocial assets, and child characteristics domain variables were entered into the multinomial logistic regression, all while controlling for sociodemographic variables. Overall, our findings suggest that data at both timepoints were missing completely at random and attrition was not due to systematic differences between participants.