Children's Emotional Stress Reactions During COVID-19 and Associations with Parents' Emotion Regulation, Stress, and Playfulness

• In Event: Different Ages, Different Challenges: COVID-19-Related Distress and Coping

Abstract

Introduction. The COVID-19 pandemic places a wide range of stressors on young children, including its invisibility, unknown duration, the danger of infection, frustration and boredom, inadequate information, lack of face to face contact with family members, friends and teachers, lack of personal space at home, and family financial loss. Young children can be especially sensitive to these changes since they have less of an ability to grasp and make sense of these changes. Children’s emotional adjustment during stressogenic events is highly dependent on their parents’ emotional state and parenting style. Children learn to regulate their emotions by observing their parents' emotion regulation strategies and by experiencing a supportive and emotionally regulated family climate during their early development. Parents’ own emotion regulation skills may thus play an important role in times of stress in terms of their ability to adequately support their children’s distress.
In our two studies, we explored young children’s emotional adjustment during the COVID-19 outbreak as it relates to their exposure to stress, and their parents’ emotion regulation abilities and playfulness.
Sample and Method. In Study 1, 351 Israeli parents of children aged 2-7 years completed online questionnaires during the first two weeks of quarantine. In our second study, a sample of 28 children, aged 3.5-7 years (M age = 5.2), and their mothers, were assessed before the COVID-19 outbreak and during the COVID-19 lockdown. Mothers reported their children’s stress symptoms and their own stress and emotion regulation abilities.
Results. In Study 1, the most frequent stress symptoms in children were nervousness, agitation, and aggression, separation fears and clinging. Parental difficulties in emotion regulation, and the level of exposure to stressogenic situations were both significantly associated with children’s stress reactions. Parental emotion regulation fully mediated the relationship between exposure to stress and children’s stress reactions. Parental playfulness was only inversely related to children’s stress reaction in fathers.
In Study 2, children’s distress levels increased in 43% of the sample and decreased in 57% of the sample. A binary logistic regression found that children who exhibited higher distress before COVID-19 were more likely to improve, in terms of their distress levels, during the outbreak. Parents’ emotion regulation abilities at baseline, and parents’ COVID-19-related stress, did not predict the children’s odds of experiencing an increase or decrease in their distress levels during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Discussion. The findings from Study 1 underscore the importance of parental emotion skills for children's emotional adjustment during stressful times. Findings from Study 2 suggest that children with different distress levels during routine times experienced the lockdown differently. Whereas children with low baseline distress experienced the lockdown as stressogenic, children with high distress levels prior to the outbreak, experienced the lockdown as less distressing than the usual routine. Taken together, our findings suggest that both children’s tendencies to experience stress prior to the crisis, and parents’ emotional skills are important predictor of young children’s stress reaction during the COVID-19 crisis. These childhood and parental characteristics should be considered by clinicians, educators, and therapists of toddlers.

Authors

• Maayan Shorer, ruppin academic center
  Presenting Author

• Liat Leibovich, R
  Non-Presenting Author