Indirect Effect of Food Insecurity Predicting Parent-Child Dysfunctional Interactions through Parenting Anxiety, Stress, and Confidence

• In Event: Predictors of Parenting Processes and Parent-Child Relationship Quality across Four Developmental Periods

Abstract

Introduction: Due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, declines in the American economy have led to rapid increases in the rates of food insecurity across the country. Food insecurity jeopardizes the psychological well-being of both parents and children, which hinder parent-child relationships. The current study aims to investigate how parental anxiety, perceived stress, and parenting confidence act as pathways linking food insecurity stress with parents’ perceptions of their interactions with their children during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: 298 mothers (M = 32.2 years) with young children (M = 15.0 months) were recruited to complete a battery of measures related to COVID-stress through Prolific and Facebook ads. At the onset of the COVID pandemic (May 2020), mothers were asked to rate four survey items related to food insecurity stress on a scale from “not at all stressful” to “extremely stressful.” These items were averaged (α = .816) to represent stress related to food insecurity during COVID-19 with higher scores indicating higher stress. Parents provided self-reports on Generalized Anxiety (Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams, & Lowe, 2006), Perceived Stress (14 items; Cohen, 1986), Parenting Confidence (Črnčec, Barnett, & Matthey, 2008), and dysfunctional parent/child interactions with a subscale of the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, 1995). Parents’ household income and child’s temperament (effortful control, negative affect; Rothbart, 1981; Putnam, et al., 2006) were controlled for in a mediating model utilizing Hayes’ Process Macro to investigate anxiety, stress, and parent confidence as parallel mediators.

Results: The proposed model including three mediators and two covariates explained 47.2% of the variance in dysfunctional parent/child interactions (F(7,236) = 30.08, p < .0001). When examining the specific indirect effects, the pathways of food insecurity to parent-child dysfunction through anxiety and perceived stress included zero in the 95% CI (LLCIanxiety = -.028; ULCIanxiety = .082; LLCIstress = -.076; ULCIstress = .053) while the pathway through parenting confidence did not include zero and can be confidently interpreted as a significant indirect pathway (LLCI = .076; ULCI = .346; Figure 1). The contrast between parenting confidence and the two indirect effects that were non-significant was also meaningfully interpreted as statistically different than each other, as they did not include zero (anxiety vs. parenting confidence: LLCI = -.347; ULCI = -.032; stress vs. parenting confidence: LLCI = -.357; ULCI = -.074).

Discussion: This model highlights that the pathway through parenting confidence explains a greater amount of the variance in the total model; while the impact of food insecurity on parenting/child relationships through anxiety and perceived stress is not significant. When controlling for parents’ income and child temperament, food insecurity impacted all three mediating variables in the expected direction, but only lowered parenting confidence as a result of increased food insecurity stress was predictive of dysfunctional parent/child interactions. As food insecurity rates increase during the pandemic, psychologists are challenged to understand the consequence of food insecurity on children and their parents in order to design and implement targeted interventions that ameliorate the negative effects of poorer access to resources due to the pandemic.

Authors

• Monique Villamor, University of North Florida
  Presenting Author

• Rayna Garcia, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sydney Karcher, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mahelet Dalke, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jody S. Nicholson, University of North Florida
  Non-Presenting Author