Children’s Problems Predict Parents’ Mental Health via Parental Burnout Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: COVID-19 and parental well-being

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt families’ daily lives and routines, compromising parents’ and children’s well-being. Following life course history, continuing pandemic conditions represents a crucial sociohistorical event that likely is having enduring effects on children’s socioemotional development as the pandemic disrupts multiple aspects of their lives. From a family systems perspective, children’s maladjustment during the pandemic may permeate family dynamics via increased parental burnout – a syndrome characterized by extreme exhaustion, low self-fulfillment, and emotional distancing due to demanding childrearing – that potentially compromises a parent’s mental health over time. The current study aims to examine how changes in children’s socioemotional problems predicted parents’ mental health via parental burnout during the first two years of the pandemic.

320 US parents with children ages 2-18 years participated in a longitudinal, online survey assessing family adjustment during the pandemic. Data collection occurred at three timepoints: Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and January 2022. Parents reported on their mental health (depression, anxiety, and negative adjustment), parental burnout, and their children’s total socioemotional difficulties (Table 1).

We fit latent growth curve models to assess initial status (i.e., intercept) and change trajectories (i.e., slope) for children’s total difficulties. The linear growth model had the best fit, X2(3)=0.23, p=.98, CFI=1.00, RMSEA=0.00, SRMR=0.01. The initial total difficulties score was 9.37 (b=9.37, p<.001) with significant variability (b=16.17, p<.001), and total difficulties scores decreased over two years (b=-0.42, p=.006) with trajectories tending to vary between children (b=1.18, p=.08).

We extracted the latent intercepts and slopes for children’s total difficulties as factor scores to explore how each predicted parents’ mental health via parental burnout in an indirect effects model (Figure 1). The model was fit with 1000 bootstrapped samples and had good fit, X2(64)=83.23, p=.053, CFI=0.98, RMSEA=0.03, SRMR=0.04. Controlling for demographics and parents’ earlier negative adjustment, we found significant direct (estimate=0.07, p=.02, 95% CI [0.02, 0.12]) and indirect effects (estimate=0.06, p=.001, 95% CI [0.03, 0.09]) for children’s total difficulties’ intercept and significant indirect effects for children’s total difficulties’ slope (estimate=0.27, p=.005, 95% CI [0.11, 0.45]). Children's high initial total difficulties prospectively predicted greater parental burnout (b=0.58, p<.001), which in turn was associated with parent's greater mental health challenges in January 2022 (b=.10, p<.001). Children's trajectories for total difficulties did not directly predict parent's mental health in January 2022 (b=0.20, p=.20); however, children’s trajectories indirectly predicted parent's greater mental health challenges via heightened parental burnout. Increasing total difficulties over time predicted greater parental burnout in January 2022 (b=2.74, p<.001), which was subsequently associated with greater parental mental health challenges in January 2022.

Despite warranted concerns surrounding children’s mental health, our findings suggest that children’s socioemotional difficulties decreased as the pandemic continued, at least in this sample of predominantly well-resourced families. However, parents of children who began the pandemic with many difficulties, or who had increasing difficulties over time, were particularly susceptible to parental burnout and heightened risk for compromised mental health. Providing resources for parents of children with challenging behaviors early and throughout a health crisis may mitigate downstream impacts on parents’ well-being.

Authors

• Lindsey Partington, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Meital Mashash, University of California - San Francisco

• Paul David Hastings, University of California - Davis