Poster #120 - The Parent-Teacher Relationship Since COVID-19: The Role of Child Emotion Regulation and Parental Pandemic Adjustment

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Background: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, families have navigated an unpredictable relationship with the school system. Historically, family-school engagement is predictive of students’ academic and socio-emotional outcomes (e.g. Smith et al., 2019), and the parent-teacher relationship is central to this collaboration (e.g. Mann & Gilmore, 2021). The worldwide interruption of in-person schooling thus created a high-risk rift in parent-teacher relationships, as parents became heavily responsible for maintaining their child’s academic progress at home with fewer interactions with teachers for many parents (Eyles et al., 2020; Francis et al., 2022). As the lingering effects of COVID-related school closures on parents and children evolve (Dorn et al., 2021), little is known about parents’ mental health and trust in their child’s teachers during the inconsistent transition back to in-person learning. Notably, in pre-pandemic research, parenting stress has been negatively associated with school engagement (e.g. Semke et al., 2010); as the pandemic has led to increased parent stress (Adams et al., 2021), understanding the effects of this challenging period on parent-teacher relationships is critical. Furthermore, although children with low self-regulation are often at increased risk for poor academic performance and reduced family-school engagement (Santiago et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2019), studies of the consequences of school closures and the transition back into the classroom for families navigating children’s regulatory challenges are virtually absent. The current study thus investigates whether parents’ stress and children’s emotion regulation reported at multiple points during the pandemic are related to parents’ self-reported relationship with their child’s teacher. We expected lower child emotion regulation and higher parenting stress to predict poorer parent-teacher relationship quality. We then explored whether parents’ reported adjustment to the pandemic played a role in the parent-teacher relationship.
Method: Longitudinal survey data was collected between 2021 and 2022. Participants included 252 parents of a child between 4 and 12. Parents reported on their stress and adjustment and their child’s emotion regulation in early 2021. One year later, parents completed the same measures and reported their relationship with their child’s teachers.
Results: After accounting for parents’ mental health and their perceptions of their child’s concurrent emotion regulation, path analyses indicated that parents’ reports of their children’s emotion regulation at Time 1, during the inconsistent transition back into the traditional classroom, was predictive of the parent-teacher relationship at Time 2, such that parents who reported lower levels of regulation in 2021 had less positive relationships with their child’s teacher in 2022. Parents’ reported parenting stress did not predict the parent-teacher relationship. Post-hoc exploratory analyses indicated that parents’ reported adjustment to the pandemic did not significantly improve from 2021 to 2022, but parents’ adjustment in 2022 did significantly predict parent-teacher relationship quality over and above children’s emotion regulation.
Conclusion: These results suggest an important connection between parents’ perceptions of their children’s regulation during COVID-19 and their relationships with their child’s teacher after the transition back to in-person learning. Moreover, this study emphasizes the importance of continuing to attend to parents’ lingering COVID-19 stresses and adjustment.

Authors

• Samantha Murray, Colorado State University
  Presenting Author

• Natalie Ehret, University of Notre Dame

• Megan Joy Moran

• Emily Carmen LaPorte, University of Notre Dame

• Julie M Braungart-Rieker, Colorado State University