Interparental Relationship and Adolescent Psychopathology during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Families of Children with Autism

• In Event: Extended family roles, parenting, and child development

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially disrupted family life. According to APA’s Stress in America Survey conducted from April 24 to May 4, individuals with children reported increased levels of stress compared to non-parents and parents one year ago. Also, Overall and colleagues (2020) showed a negative impact of COVID-19 stress on couples with children, including decreased satisfaction and commitment compared to pre-pandemic levels. A critical next step is to examine how impairments in parents’ marital relationship during COVID-19 are associated with children’s mental health. Eshraghi et al. (2020) noted that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families are at high risk for experiencing negative impacts due to COVID-19, given the importance of routines for these families which are now disrupted. Moreover, even pre-pandemic, research showed that couples raising a child with ASD experience greater marital discord (Hartley et al., 2017). The purpose of this study is to examine (a) the extent to which the marital relationship changed during COVID-19, as compared to pre-pandemic levels, and (b) how these changes are associated with change in internalizing symptoms among children with ASD. We also plan to examine ASD symptom severity as a moderator to identify which children were most vulnerable to experiencing worsening mental health in the context of poorer marital quality during the pandemic. We hypothesized that the quality of the marital relationship would worsen, and decreasing marital satisfaction and increased marital conflict would be related to increasing levels of child internalizing symptoms. We also hypothesized these associations would be stronger for children with more severe ASD symptoms. Participants are part of an ongoing, longitudinal study and include 119 children with ASD (M age= 13.10 years, SD= 2.19; 80.7% male; 70% White, 10.9% Hispanic/Latinx, 5% Asian, 2.5% African American, and 11.8% more than one race) and both of their parents. Parents were contacted twice during the pandemic to complete additional online surveys (April and July; 78% completed at least one survey); a third survey will be sent in October. Specific measures and descriptive information are in Table 1. Initial findings are based on pre-pandemic data from families’ last visit before the pandemic; pandemic data comes from the April survey. We controlled for elapsed time (in days) between the pre- and during-pandemic assessments and used mothers’ data. Contrary to hypotheses, a repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant increase in marital satisfaction [Mother: F(1, 87)= 13.06, p=.001; Father: F(1, 41)= 4.21, p=.047] and decrease in conflict [Mother: F(1, 87)= 11.13, p=.001; Father: F(1, 41)= 20.77, p<.001]. However, partial correlations, controlling for pre-pandemic levels of children’s symptoms, showed that mothers’ satisfaction was negatively correlated with child depressive symptoms, r= -0.34, p<.001, and conflict was positively associated with child depressive symptoms r= 0.28, p=.01. Future analyses will include both mothers’ and fathers’ data from all three online COVID-19 surveys conducted since April, and test ASD symptom severity as a moderator. This study will advance research on the impact of COVID-19 on children’s development by documenting longitudinal change in marital quality and children’s mental health.

Authors

• Chrystyna D Kouros, Southern Methodist University
  Presenting Author

• Naomi Ekas, Texas Christian University
  Non-Presenting Author