The Cascading Effects of the COVID19 Pandemic on Family Hardship and Children’s Psychological Well-Being

• In Event: Trajectories of Family Mental Health During COVID-19: A Focus on Socioeconomic Contexts

Abstract

The COVD-19 pandemic has likely affected children’s psychological well-being through family’s economic circumstances, including parental job loss; income loss; material hardship; and caregiving burden. Each of these mechanisms relates to children’s well-being and they can co-occur. Thus, the ways that the COVID-19 crisis affects children may be additive and accumulate. This study will examine four research questions:
1. How has the COVID-19 crisis affected children’s psychological well-being?
2. How have families experienced hardships throughout the pandemic and how do these hardships accumulate?
3. How are COVID-related hardships related to children’s psychological well-being, individually and collectively, both at a point in time and cumulatively as the pandemic persists?
4. How do these associations vary by family race/ethnicity and immigrant status?

Method
Individuals were eligible if they worked in an hourly service-industry position in a retail, food service, or hotel business in a large U.S. city, had a child aged 2-7, and had a mobile phone. Recruitment used venue-based sampling, a technique for producing generalizable samples of hard-to-reach, un-rostered populations.
When first recruited in August-November 2019, participants were asked to complete 30 days of daily surveys about parents’ work and children’s psychological well-being and a one-time survey about household characteristics, parental work, and income. Between February 20, and July 31 2020, the original sample was contacted about an additional 14-day wave of daily data collection (74% response rate). Beginning on March 23, 2020 all participants who had already received their two weeks of daily survey prompts from wave 2 were asked to complete the wave 3 one-time survey about the COVID-19 crisis (77% response rate). Beginning on May 27, 2020, all participants who had already received their two weeks of daily survey prompts from wave 2 were asked to complete a second one-time survey about the COVID-19 crisis (80% response rate). Wave 5 launched on September 8, 2020; all sample members will be invited to participate.
All survey questions and answers were sent and received via SMS text message.
We will use descriptive statistics and longitudinal ordered probit regression models, with child psychological well-being variables as the outcomes and pandemic events and hardships, and their accumulation and duration, as predictor variables. We will estimate pooled regressions and subgroup-specific regressions by race/ethnicity, and immigration.

Preliminary findings
Using data from waves 2 and 3, we showed that early in the COVID-19 crisis families had experienced multiple hardships. The more hardships families had experienced, the worse children’s psychological well-being (BLINDED, 2020).
Initial findings with wave 4 data revealed that children experienced substantial symptoms of psychological distress during this pandemic. Parents reported on child behavior over the last two weeks: on more than half of the days or nearly every day, 7% of children seemed sad or worried and 16% of children were uncooperative.
Future analyses will use data from all five waves to trace the development of families’ hardships and children’s psychological well-being over time from before the COVID-19 crisis began through the ongoing crisis.

Authors

• Anna Gassman-Pines, Duke Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Barnard College
  Non-Presenting Author