Developmental Trajectories of Children’s Behavioral Health and Family Well-Being Prior To and Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: The COVID-19 Pandemic: Social, Emotional, and Academic Outcomes Across Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

During the first year of the pandemic, children’s lives were fundamentally altered by public health measures to reduce the disease’s spread. Notably, widespread and enduring closures of child care, preschools, and schools affected over 1 billion children globally that year. Ongoing physical distancing measures, disrupted work and family life, instability in school structures and functioning, among other factors, have also posed distinct challenges for children’s caregivers, potentially influencing their ability to insulate children from the instability and uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Building from work documenting the impact of stress and vulnerability due to economic uncertainty and poverty, the stress and strain faced by children and parents resulting from the pandemic are likely to increase children’s challenging behaviors (e.g., dysregulation, withdrawal, aggression, and non-compliance). Indeed, a growing body of empirical research is revealing concerning trends in children’s behavioral health. For example, in a nationally representative sample of US parents, 14% reported their child had relatively worse behavior at the start of the pandemic compared with before the crisis (Patrick et al., 2020).

Documenting the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for children’s behavioral health, and whether these changes co-occur with changes in family well-being, can inform efforts to minimize adverse effects and address declines in child well-being. However, a challenge in much of the existing research on this topic is that it largely relies on either retrospective reports from parents (comparing children’s behaviors pre- and post-shutdown) or comparisons of disconnected cross-sectional pre- and post-samples. In contrast, a small set of studies have documented changes in children’s outcomes pre- and post-shutdown using data collected on the same set of children before the onset of the pandemic and after the shutdowns in 2020 (e.g., Weiland & Morris, 2022).

Specifically, Hanno et al. (2021), document increases in children’s dysregulated, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors and decreases in children’s adaptive behaviors. In this same study, the shifts in children’s behavioral outcomes co-occurred with changes in family functioning including increases in parent stress, household chaos, parent-child conflict, and declines in parental mental health. This paper builds on this work, employing additional waves of data (5 in total from fall 2018 when children were ages 3/4 through spring 2022 when they were 8/9) from the same a longitudinal, population study to describe developmental trajectories of children’s behavioral wellbeing (regulatory skills, adaptive behaviors, behavior problems) and family functioning (parent-child conflict, parent stress and mental health) up to the widespread pandemic related shutdowns in March 2020 and for the two years beyond them. Employing a large, representative sample of children (n=3665; Jones et al., 2020), this paper employs data from repeated parent surveys and (1) child/family fixed effects models (making within-child comparisons between outcomes pre- and post-shutdown) and (2) growth curve models to describe short- and longer-term effects of the pandemic on children and families.

Authors

• Lily S Fritz, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City

• Nonie Lesaux, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Alan Mozaffari, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Jacqueline Ramos-Draper, Harvard University