Quarantine During the COVID-19 Pandemic is Associated with Child Maladjustment Through Exposure to Parental Conflict

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

Quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic presents significant risk for family well-being. In particular, quarantine represents an abrupt and stressful disruption to daily living hypothesized to increase parental conflict (Prime et al., 2020). Parental conflict, in turn, is a robust predictor of child maladjustment, including internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Cummings & Davies, 2011; van Eldik et al., 2020), and is anticipated to be associated with child maladjustment during the pandemic (Prime et al., 2020). Identifying mechanisms underlying internalizing and externalizing behaviors among children during the pandemic can critically inform policies to enhance family well-being. Quarantine during the pandemic was anticipated to be associated with more parental conflict, which, in turn, was hypothesized to be positively associated with child internalizing and externalizing behaviors.

Participants included 358 parents (62.3% mothers) of 4- to 10-year-olds (M=7.38, SD=2.01; 56.3% male) living in the United States. Families were recruited via Facebook Ads and postings on Amazon Mechanical Turk that were only available to accounts where individuals prequalified as being in a romantic relationship and as a parent of a young child. Data cleaning followed best-practice guidelines, including screening for eligibility, attention checks, and problematic response patterns (e.g., straightlining). Parents completed questionnaires regarding their experiences with COVID-19, including whether anybody in their household quarantined because of the pandemic, the O’Leary-Porter Scale (Porter &O’Leary, 1980), the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (PT4-10; Goodman, 2005), and the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus et al., 1998). The O’Leary-Porter Scale includes 10 common interadult conflicts. Parents rated the frequency in which each conflict occurred in front of their child (never=0, very frequently=5) during the year prior to and since the pandemic to control for historical conflict on child maladjustment. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire includes 30-items measuring children’s internalizing (e.g., anxiety) and externalizing (i.e., aggression) behaviors. Parents completed the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale to control for parent-child aggression on adjustment. Additional covariates identified by correlational analyses included child age, child gender, parent age, and recruitment source (Table 1), which were covaried on all pathways in the main analysis. Data were collected late April through May, 2020.

The indirect effect analysis was conducted in MPlus using one saturated model to evaluate the indirect effects of quarantine on child internalizing and externalizing behaviors through parental conflict (Figure 1). The bias-corrected bootstrap method using 1,000 resamples to construct 95% confidence intervals around the product coefficients of the indirect effects was used. Quarantine was associated with more parental conflict (b =0.13, SE=0.04, p=.001), which, in turn, was positively associated with children’s externalizing (b= 0.20, SE=0.07, p<.01) and internalizing behaviors (b=0.34, SE=0.08, p<.001). Quarantine was not significantly associated with externalizing (b=0.01, SE=0.05, p=.83) and internalizing behaviors (b=0.06, SE= 0.05, p=. 27). However, significant indirect pathways from quarantine to externalizing (95%CI [0.008,0.064]) and internalizing behaviors (95%CI [0.014,0.090]) through parental conflict were observed. Findings suggest that quarantine can have deleterious effects on child adjustment through exposure to parental conflict and present implications for services aimed to enhance family well-being during and after the pandemic.

Authors

• Monica Lawson, University of Texas at San Antonio
  Presenting Author

• Montana Baker, University of Texas at San Antonio
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michaela Simon, University of Texas at San Antonio
  Non-Presenting Author