Variations in Empathic Concern During COVID-19 Pandemic Moderated by Stress to Predict Parental Abilities

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 pandemic has brought about many challenges for families worldwide. During the time this study was carried out there was a lockdown in Israel with most parents staying at home with their children, possibly facing health, economic, and psychological concerns - stressors which might put parental competence to the test. Parental qualities such as the capacity of being involved and attuned to their children, is thought to rely on empathic concern (EC), the ability to experience feelings of sympathy and compassion for unfortunate others (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990). Parents who exhibit high levels of EC were found to have stronger relationships with their children and reported higher satisfaction with their role as parents (Manczak, 2017). Parental EC was also associated with positive child outcomes, such as prosocial behavior (Farrant et al., 2012). Here, we evaluated whether fluctuations in EC during the stressful period of covid-19 lockdown can be predictive of parenting capacities. We also aim to explore how this may predict children's emotions and behaviors in a follow up study.
Methods: 404 parents of 0-6 years old children were recruited online and filled a battery of questionnaires across 8 time points during the three-months lockdown (April 1st- June 7th, 2020). EC was measured using the ‘empathic concern’ subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980), adapted for weekly measurement. We assessed parental competence using the ‘parental accomplishment’ subscale of Parental Burnout Inventory (Roskam et al., 2017) and ‘positive parenting’ subscale of Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (Frick, 1991). Multilevel modeling analyses were conducted for parental competence assessing the moderating effect of stress on within (wEC) and between variances of EC.
Recently, the rising number of infected individuals has led Israel to a second lockdown. We aim to conduct a follow-up study with the same participants, assessing the effects of parenting capacity on children’s emotions and behaviors using measures such as Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997).
Results: Lists of models and comparison between models are reported in Table 1 and 2. The stress*wEC interaction improved the fit of the model predicting parental accomplishment. When stress was low, wEC (the change in EC throughout 8-time-points) did not predict parental accomplishment (p=0.49), however, positive associations were found between wEC and parental accomplishment when stress was moderate (r = 0.11, p = 0.03) and high (r = 0.24, p = 0.014). Similar patterns were found for positive parenting yielding a significant stress*wEC interaction. When stress was low, wEC did not predict positive parenting (p=0.51), while positive correlations were found between wEC and positive parenting when stress was moderate (r = 0.14, p = 0.009) and high (r = 0.2, p = 0.015).
Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence for the role of EC in two domains of parenting. Our results suggest that during times of stress parental functioning is more sensitive to changes in EC, which, when increases, can help maintain parental capacities. Maintaining parental functioning during stressful situations might affect children's emotions and behaviors, an association which will be assessed in our forthcoming study.

Authors

• Ido Shalev, Ben Gurion University
  Presenting Author

• Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University in the Negev
  Non-Presenting Author