Family Stress, Risk and Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Family and child health and wellbeing during COVID-19: insights from New Zealand and Australia

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple, ongoing challenges to family relationships, which are essential to adults’ and children’s health and wellbeing. External stressors, such as economic hardship and disasters, threaten the quality of family relationships, especially when families are already dealing with pre-existing difficulties that make them more vulnerable to family disruption. This talk will present a conceptual framework for understanding how the cumulative stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic affect family processes that harm both adults’ and children’s health and wellbeing.

Drawing on theory and research across developmental, family, relationship and health sciences, the Family Stress, Vulnerability, Risk and Resilience (SVR2) Model highlights that facing COVID-19-related stress is likely to increase harmful processes within the family system. These include harmful processes within couples’ relationships (e.g., inter-parental conflict, marital problems), within parent-child relationships (e.g., harsh, unresponsive parenting), and across family subsystems (e.g., poorer coparenting, greater family chaos). These damaging effects will be greater when parents and children have pre-existing vulnerabilities that amplify the detrimental effects of family stress (e.g., attachment insecurity, depression, sexist attitudes) and will likely be exacerbated by the broader context in which families are situated (e.g., social class, minority status). The culmination of stress, pre-existing vulnerabilities and family disruptions will undermine the quality of family relationships (e.g., marital quality, parent-child relationship bonds) and have detrimental effects on parent’s and children’s health and wellbeing.

The Family SVR2 Model outlines the myriad of ways the current pandemic will impact family relationships and which families in which contexts may be most at risk for adverse consequences. Data tracking families prior to and during the pandemic will be used to illustrate the utility of the model and the importance of identifying pre-existing vulnerabilities assessed prior to the pandemic. Families involving more attachment insecurity and greater hostile gender-role attitudes (pre-existing vulnerabilities) and who faced greater life stress marked by economic loss, financial insecurity and parenting stress during the pandemic (pandemic-related stress) experienced increases in marital problems and family-based aggression when quarantined in the home during the pandemic. The challenges of the pandemic also increased difficulties equitably balancing parenting and housework. These harmful processes undermined the quality of family relationships, including reductions in couples’ satisfaction and parent-child bonds, and contributed to reductions in parents’ and children’s health and well-being.

The Family SVR2 Model identifies the essential factors that need to be addressed in order to mitigate the potential adverse effects of the current crisis on families and their children. The framework also offers key directions for the processes that should be targeted in future research examining families during crises, and the methodological challenges that arise when assessing important risk processes as families navigate the cumulative challenges of the pandemic. Finally, the Family SVR2 model notes the importance of going beyond risk to identify resilience processes that help families, thereby protecting health and wellbeing in the face of the ongoing stress of the pandemic.

Authors

• Nickola C. Overall, University of Auckland
  Presenting Author

• Paula R. Pietromonaco, University of Massachusetts
  Non-Presenting Author