Child Care Disruptions and Other Risks on the Functioning of Latinx families: Promotive and Protective Factors

• In Event: Promoting Access to Social Supports and Resources Throughout COVID-19 for Latine Families with Young Children

Abstract

Introduction. The impact of extreme adversity such as the experience of COVID on family functioning has been particularly felt among families with limited economic and social resources such as Latinx families (Brown et al., 2020; He, Cabrera, & Chen, 2021; Magson et al., 2021). The pandemic has also intensely changed young children’s lives: their daily routines and child care arrangements were dramatically altered overnight (Pachter et al., 2020; de Figueiredo et al., 2021). The effect this unexpected crisis has on families who are already living on borrowed time is unfathomable. In particular, the disruption to often-difficult to secure child care arrangements can be emotionally and economically devastating for children and their caregivers. But, low-income families also exhibit many strengths (e.g., optimism, economic support) that they can draw from to protect themselves from the negative effects of risk on their wellbeing (Cabrera et al., 2021). Unfortunately, this literature is rather limited—there is less clarity about the protective factors that lessen the negative effect than there is about the negative effect of adversity on wellbeing (Feldman & Shaw, 2021). Thus, understanding the resources families can draw on to protect themselves can provide guidance to programs and policies to allocate resources in a way that actually meets the needs of families. We focus on a sample of economically diverse Hispanic families, a group that is underrepresented in resilience research, and examine the unique consequence of economic risk (i.e., job, income loss and inability to make ends meet) and social risk (i.e., child care arrangements) experienced during the pandemic for parent stress, parent engagement, and children’s socioemotional skills.

Research Questions & Hypotheses. We address the following research questions: (1) How are economic and social risks experienced during the pandemic uniquely associated with mothers’ and fathers’ stress, parenting behaviors, and children’s socioemotional skills? (2) How do perceived coparenting supports, parents’ positivity, and economic and social supports moderate the association between social and economic risks and parental stress, parenting behaviors, and children’s socioemotional skills? We hypothesize that parents who report higher risks will report lower family functioning and that families who support higher levels of risk and higher level of resources will report better functioning than those who do not.

Study Population & Methods. We used data from a parenting intervention with primarily Hispanic (74%) mothers and fathers (N=284) and their children (Table 1). BB2 participants responded to an additional survey during March 2020 about additional risks they experienced during the pandemic. A total of 292 parents were contacted and 247 consented and completed this survey (84.6% of response rate).

Preliminary Results. We report three sets of preliminary findings. First, we found that increases in economic risk was associated with more child competence skills whereas increases in social risk was associated with less parent engagement. Positivity and economic support moderated the effects of economic risk on parental stress and engagement. These findings show that to intervene effectively with low-income Hispanic families, we need to strengthen and support the resources they have to cope with adversity

Authors

• Natasha J Cabrera, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Minxuan He, Mount Saint Mary’s University

• Yu Chen, New York University School of Medicine

• Stephanie M Reich, University of California - Irvine