COVID-19 impact on parental emotion socialization and youth socioemotional adjustment in Italy

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the likelihood for youth around the world of being at risk for adjustment problems.
Italy was the first western country hit by COVID-19. When that happened, schools were in lockdown and closed their academic year fully remotely. With schools closed, parents have become full-time child-care providers and home-school teachers.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

How much has COVID-19 affected: (1) parental emotion socialization toward their children’s emotional reactions, (2) youth socioemotional adjustment, and (3) the impact of parental emotion socialization on youth socioemotional adjustment?
It was hypothesized that supportive parental responses toward youth emotional reactions before the COVID-19 pandemic would serve a protective function and would be associated with youth socioemotional adjustment since the pandemic began. It was hypothesized that non-supportive parental emotion socialization reactions before the COVID-19 pandemic would be associated with youth emotion dysregulation and adjustment problems since the pandemic began.

Method

This study involves a cross-sectional sample of 300 parents (70% mothers) of children aged between 6 and 18 years old (youth average age= 11,36 years old, SD = 3,79; 55% boys). This is an ongoing data collection. Anonymous data were collected via Qualtrics. The study was approved by local Human Subjects Institutional Review Board. Parents were required to answer twice to the questions about supportive and unsupportive parental socialization toward their chidren’s anger and sadness (Emotions as a Child Scale; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007; Magai & O'Neal, 1997) and youth socioemotional adjustment (internalizing and externalizing symptoms; CBCL; Achenbach, 1991), framing each item before the COVID-19 pandemic (PRE) and since the pandemic began (POST). Questions about youth emotion dysregulation (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale; Gratz & Roemer, 2004) referred only to since the pandemic began.
A series of paired t-tests were implemented to compare mean differences among the study variables examined PRE and POST.

Results

Since COVID-19 began, it emerged an increase in supportive parental anger socialization (t-test = -2.07, p<.01), in unsupportive parental sadness socialization (t-test = -6.70, p<.01), in supportive parental sadness socialization (ttest = -6.57, p<.01), and in both internalizing (t-test = -3.586, p<.01) and externalizing problems (t-test = -3.57, p<.01). Those increasing trends may show some of the negative consequences of COVID-19 on parent-child relationships. However, those trends may also be due to the increase in the amount of time parents spent with their children because of the quarantine.
Pearson’s correlations among all the study variables were examined (Table 1). Positive correlations emerged between unsupportive parental emotion socialization, youth emotion dysregulation, and youth internalizing and externalizing problems.
With an upcoming larger sample size, we aim to examine the conceptual model reported in Figure 1, also controlling for parental social desirability, parental years of education, youth gender, and youth age, with a series of FIML path analyses (i.e., separately for mothers’ and fathers’ emotion socialization and for anger and sadness-related mechanisms).

Conclusions

This study supports that, since the pandemic began, many children may have increased the likelihood to belong to problematic trends for their future positive development.
Theoretical and practical implications of these results will be discussed.

Authors

• Laura Di Giunta, Sapienza University of Rome
  Presenting Author

• Goren Gordon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Liliana Angelica Ponguta, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author