Impact on Mental Health of Families during Covid-19: A Cross-Sectional Survey PMC

As a final step in our analysis, we tested a multiple‐group model, to evaluate if the effects related to our hypotheses were invariant across the six countries. Both endogenous variables (financial wellbeing and positive outlook) were also regressed on the three covariates. Family socioeconomic status was measured by presenting a ladder with 10 levels (from 1 to 10), asking participants to indicate where they would place their family of origin on the ladder (Adler et al., 2000). Country, gender, age, living status, employment status, and family socioeconomic status were used as covariates.

Advance Health & Well-Being

Monitoring ongoing parent mental health and parenting needs, and intervening where appropriate, should be of high importance for public health efforts to promote child well-being. Many participant responses reflected the theme of self-doubt, in their parenting abilities–in their abilities to connect with their children and to stimulate their growth intellectually, physically, emotionally, and socially. Having multiple children in the home, unmet childcare needs, and relationship distress were additional risk factors for low-quality parenting across multiple indicators. Significant correlations were identified with household income, number of children, marital status, history of mental illness, relationship distress, employment loss, unmet childcare needs, and depression with at least one parenting variable (Table 2). Each of these factors, alone and in combination, has been linked to lower parenting quality (e.g., low responsivity, increased harsh parenting, decreased positive parenting, disengaged parenting) and the emergence of child health and development impairments 35–42.

Therefore, the current study systematically tested a model of family resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity for researchers to study how families adapt to high levels of https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/2025-us-tornadoes-and-severe-storms/ adversity that affect almost every domain of a family’s life. However, other researchers have found that fathers but not mothers experienced a higher level of parenting stress during the pandemic compared to a year prior (Taubman-Ben-Ari et al., 2021) and that fathers of older infants may be particularly at risk for COVID-19 related anxieties (Ben-Yaakov and Taubman-Ben-Ari, 2021). Being vaccinated may mitigate the impact of vulnerability factors and increase the role of protective factors on family adaptation (e.g., allay concern over physical health risks; permit return to social activity). During the pandemic, racially diverse groups experienced disproportionate physical harm from COVID-19 relative to White individuals (Lopez et al., 2021) and more negative financial and mental health outcomes due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Fortuna et al., 2020; Trammell et al., 2023).

Resources for Parents and Caregivers

Significant interactions were found between the family coping-strategy clusters pre-COVID-19 and the FQOL factors before and during the pandemic. At the same time, longitudinal studies have indicated increased parent-child conflict, abuse risk, and psychological aggression . However, self-report of mental health is widely used in public-health observational research and have been shown to have high sensitivity and specificity for diagnosis 76–78. A final methodological limitation was the use of self-reports of mental health which capture symptom levels, not clinical diagnoses . Given that the majority of child-care tasks are often carried by mothers, it is not unexpected to have mothers responding at a disproportionately higher rate because of their primary role in parenting .

Data analysis

Interestingly, some families also reported positive changes, such as stronger relationships and more opportunities for appreciation (Evans et al., 2020). Indeed, qualitative research demonstrated increased family strain during the pandemic (Evans et al., 2020). These changes to the family unit may lead to subsequent disruptions in child well-being (Prime et al., 2020). A path model revealed that there were concurrent effects from COVID-19 exposure, pre-existing vulnerabilities, and racial diversity status to the family protective, vulnerability, and adaptation variables. This infographic summarizes key findings from the Family Snapshot Reports and highlights different ways of supporting families as they navigate through residual challenges as a result of these closures. By noting common themes across parent responses, these reports aim to shed light on how some families described their experience with the disruptions.

• The COVID-19 pandemic elicited many facets of situational meaning across a number of domains.
• In particular, regarding parents’ previous traumas, we found that parents’ prior trauma exposure significantly predicted children’s psychological difficulties both directly, and via the serial mediation of parents’ peritraumatic distress due to COVID-19 and parenting stress.
• The current study examined a concurrent model of family resilience using the family resilience model (Henry et al., 2015).
• This variable was coded into one variable reflecting in person (0) or hybrid model and fully virtual (1) schooling, consistent with prior researching showing that children and parents who have children engaged in any form of virtual learning are at higher risk for negative outcomes (Verlenden et al. 2021).

Further, this may put vulnerable parents, such as those who are single parents or those who live in dysfunctional relationships, in a more vulnerable position in comparison with those who do not. Besides, fathers expressed gratitude for the opportunity of sharing precious moments with their children . Therefore, first-time mothers reported that they found support in other ways. Part of the formal support was reduced or absent during the pandemic 1, 5, 18. Adesanya et al. reported that at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lack of knowledge about how COVID-19 affected pregnancy and breastfeeding, which limited healthcare providers’ ability to provide consistent evidence-based information.

Family functioning profiles predicting distal child outcomes at Time 2 (September–October 2020). Accounting for T1 SDQ scores, T1 LPA profiles predicted T2 child adjustment over and above the stability of child adjustment. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, the 4-class vs. 5-class solutions appeared to be capturing similar patterns of family functioning across all indicators with the 4-class solution providing more conceptually clear and distinct family functioning patterns (for 5-class solution; see Supplementary Figure S1). We ran LPA with one to five classes (see Table 2 for fit statistics) and determined the four-profile model to be the best fitting solution due to the following reasons.