Distress and poor parenting during COVID-19: the buffering effects of partner support and cooperative coparenting

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

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented stress on families. Parents have had to balance work, economic pressures and childcare while isolated from networks that help alleviate these burdens. Emerging research highlights that parents are experiencing increased distress and drops in mental health during the pandemic (e.g., Twenge & Joiner, 2020), and developmental scholars warn that such distress will undermine parenting and, in turn, child health and wellbeing (Prime et al., 2020). In the current research, we test whether parents’ distress reduces warm/responsive parenting, increases harsh parenting, and undermines parent-child relationship quality, as families endured a 5-week COVID-19 lockdown. Our primary aim was to identify whether support processes within the family, including partner support and cooperative coparenting, reduced the detrimental effects of parents’ distress on these parenting outcomes.

To test the links between parents’ distress, poor parenting and family support processes, we leveraged an ongoing family study in which parents had reported on their parenting prior to the pandemic (N = 362 parents). Parents then reported on their parenting, psychological distress, perceived partner support and cooperative coparenting during a nationwide lockdown. During the lockdown, families were confined to the home for 5 weeks with only one person able to occasionally leave the house to gather essential resources (e.g., groceries, medicine) under strict social distancing protocols. This longitudinal design allowed us to test (1) whether parents’ distress during lockdown predicted residual changes in parenting marked by harsher parenting, less warm/responsive parenting, and lower parent-child relationship quality, and (2) whether perceived partner support and cooperative coparenting buffered these detrimental effects.

Dyadic multilevel analyses supported concerns that parents’ distress would amplify poor parenting, including greater distress predicting residual increases in harsh parenting and residual decreases in both warm/responsive parenting and parent-child relationship quality. Importantly, perceiving high levels of partner support (partners’ expressions of reassurance and comfort) eliminated the links between parents’ greater distress and residual increases in harsh parenting. Conversely, perceptions of cooperative coparenting (cooperatively working together as a parental unit) mitigated the links parents’ distress and residual decreases in warm/responsive parenting and parent-child relationship quality.

The pattern of findings provide novel insights into the way support processes may facilitate better parenting during stressful and challenging times. By helping downregulate negative emotions and feelings that people are unable to cope, partner support may reduce how much parents’ emotional distress spills over to harsh parenting. By contrast, cooperative coparenting should temper the demands and difficulty of parenting, bypass stress-related depletion, and increase feelings of efficacy and competence in ways that help parents sustain warm, responsive parenting and satisfy parent-child bonds. Taken together, by tracking families prior to and during a nationwide lockdown, the results indicate that partner support and cooperative coparenting are important family-based targets to help protect child well-being and development during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors

• Caitlin McRae, University of Auckland
  Presenting Author

• Valerie T. Chang, University of Auckland
  Non-Presenting Author