Poster #142 - Examining the Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Young Children’s Emotional Distress Using Propensity Score Matching

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Background
The COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying containment measures, such as strict lockdowns, have had a drastic impact on the lives of children around the world. Research on prior pandemics and natural, economic, and social disasters suggests that they had both immediate and prolonged negative consequences for child development, with particular risks faced by young children (see a review in Benner & Mistry, 2020). Since early 2020, there has been evidence about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s emotional health (e.g., Bignardi et al., 2020; Jiao et al., 2020). However, there have been inconsistent findings and a lack of consensus on whether and how much the pandemic is detrimental to children’s emotional health. One possible reason behind such inconsistency is researchers’ inevitable reliance on nonexperimental data, which introduces the problem of selection and maturation effects and prohibits them from drawing firm causal conclusions.
Aims
The purpose of this study was to examine the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns on young children’s emotional distress and its underlying family-level mechanisms. To achieve this goal, we recruited households with young children from Wuhan and Zhengzhou, two cities in China where the outbreaks had different degrees of seriousness, and that instituted different levels of lockdown. In doing so, we had an opportunity to create a natural experiment in which children were assigned to conditions with different “loads” of the coronavirus and lockdown measures.
Method
Participants were 814 households with young children (age: M ± SD = 49.04 ± 4.55 months) recruited Wuhan (N = 310) and Zhengzhou (N = 504). Data were collected between mid-June and mid-July 2020 when Wuhan was gradually opening up after its 76-day-long strict lockdown, but at which time all preschools in Wuhan and Zhengzhou remained closed. Primary caregivers reported children’s emotional distress, family income change, household chaos, and their own involvement in children’s education and worries about health and basic resources. Propensity scores were used to match children from the “high-load” (Wuhan) and “low-load” (Zhengzhou) conditions on a series of variables. Multivariate regressions were employed to examine the impact of COVID-19 and lockdowns on children’s emotional distress and its family-level mechanisms.
Results
The results showed that compared with a demographically comparable group of young children who lived in a city with “low loads” of coronavirus and lockdown (Zhengzhou), young children who lived in a city with “high loads” (Wuhan) exhibited statistically significantly more symptoms of emotional distress, including anxiety/withdrawal, fear, and acting out. Households from Wuhan had more worries about health and basic resources than did households from Zhengzhou, which explained the differences in young children’s symptoms of emotional distress between the two cities.
Conclusions
This study provides strong evidence for the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures on young children’s emotional distress and their caregivers’ worries about health and basic resources as an important family-level mechanism. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating the impact of lockdowns on children and families in policy making.

Authors

• Xiao Zhang, The University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author

• Nan XIAO, Ohio State University