Changing family relationships in early adolescence during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of parents’ and adolescents’ stress and coping

• In Event: Family Adjustment During the Global Outbreak of COVID-19: A Longitudinal and International Perspective

Abstract

Introduction and Hypotheses
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the extensive measures to prevent a further spread of the virus have had a major impact on the daily life of all citizens, including families with adolescent children (Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2020). In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, children could temporarily not attend school and had to do their schoolwork from home, had limited (face-to-face) contact with peers, and their structured leisure activities were often cancelled. At the same time, many parents had to work from home and supervise the schoolwork of their children. These changes in family life, combined with the anxiety and worries resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, might have an impact on parenting and parent-child relationship quality (Yoshikawa et al., 2020).
However, not all families might be affected by the crisis to a similar extent (Lindgaard et al., 2009). In particular parents and adolescents who experienced high levels of stress resulting from the preventive measures, or worried about changes in their financial situation or the well-being and health of themselves and their relatives, might react with more negativity in parenting or parent-child interactions (Taylor et al., 2020). Moreover, we expected that employing active coping strategies might make parents and adolescent less vulnerable to a negative impact of the stressors on family relationships (Hampel & Petermann, 2006; Rodriguez et al., 2019).
Study Population and Methods
The current study used two waves of data from the InTransition project, including 240 Dutch parents (85% female) and adolescents (52% female; Mage 11 years). Data was collected in fall 2019 and spring 2020. Using Latent Change Score models, we examined whether and how family relationships changed from the pre-COVID-19 to the COVID-19 period. Two aspects of parent-reported parenting (i.e., positive parenting and discipline practices; Frick, 1991) and two aspects of adolescent-reported relationship quality (i.e., support and negative interaction; Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) were included. Moreover, we examined the moderating role of parents’ and adolescents’ experience of COVID-19-related stressors (Sarason et al., 1978), active coping (Schreurs et al., 1988), and the interaction between stress and coping on relationship change.
Results
Figure 1 shows that families decreased in their levels of positive parenting and support during the COVID-19 period. However, they also decreased their levels of negative interaction and remained on average stable in their discipline practices. This suggests that it might be hard for parents to stay supportive, but also that families seem more careful to not enter negative interaction patterns.
Stress and coping could not explain differences between families for most of the constructs. Only for positive parenting, there was a significant interaction effect of stress and coping, with active coping leading to smaller decreases in positive parenting only in families who experienced low levels of COVID-related stress (see Figure 2). This suggests that when people experience many COVID-19-related stressors, active coping practices, such as seeking social support, might not suffice. Moreover, such coping strategies might be more difficult to employ during times of social distancing.
 

Authors

• Monika H. Donker, Universiteit Utrecht
  Presenting Author

• Stefanos Mastrotheodoros, Universiteit Utrecht
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Branje, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author