Poster #119 - Unique sources of variability in individual caregivers’ day-to-day affect during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread mental health difficulties, and caregivers of young children have faced particular challenges, with consequences for children. Studies show that families facing economic stressors and racism were more prone to these challenges (McLaughlin et al., 2022). However, less work examines the dynamics of caregivers’ wellbeing over time: independent of more stable demographic factors, what made someone feel better or worse each day? Importantly, this may differ for different caregivers; identifying these relations can point to targets for interventions to improve parental wellbeing during the critical early years of children’s lives. In this study, we are uniquely poised to answer this question because we track changes to caregivers’ positive and negative affect across a period of multiple weeks in 2020-2021 (25-65 days).

Study participants were 42 racially and socioeconomically diverse caregivers of 18-26-month-olds (M=21.82m at study start; 52% white) living in the USA, who completed 25-65 daily surveys (median=60surveys). Each day, caregivers received a text to complete a survey, which included the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), and questions about their worries, sleep, how they spent their time that day, and any financial assistance received (e.g., government stimulus check). Caregivers rated their relative worry for each of 13 items (e.g., are you more [+1] or less [-1] worried about money today?). Finally, family-level variables were linked with national daily data related to the pandemic (e.g., COVID cases). In pre-registered analyses designed to deal with potential multi-collinearity, we performed separate cross-validated ridge regressions for each family, to explore which variables explain each caregiver’s positive and negative affect. We supplement these with qualitative explanations from a subset of participants who were interviewed after study completion.

We found that caregivers’ moods were variable across the study (Fig1). Further, these day-to-day changes could be well predicted by the factors we explored. While we expected that caregivers may vary in the predictors of their positive and negative affect, we found striking uniformity across the group. Most caregivers felt more positive and less negative when they slept better, had more leisure time that day, and had lower average relative worries. Interestingly, however, caregivers’ specific worries differed meaningfully across families. These relative worries alone were enough to predict most caregivers’ positive and negative affect with high accuracy (Fig2). Some families were particularly affected by worries about government restrictions; others worries about their relationships. Overall, most families felt more positive and less negative when they were less worried about burning out and how good of a job they are doing as a parent.

Our results point to the need for greater long-term support for caregivers of young children to ease burnout—a significant mental health concern for this population. They further suggest that interventions to support parents should focus on making them feel more confident in their parenting. This study demonstrates the benefit of repeated daily sampling for understanding caregivers’ wellbeing, illustrating commonalities and differences across caregivers in predictors of wellbeing, and highlighting the unique experiences of parenting a young child during the pandemic.

Authors

• Monica E Ellwood-Lowe, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Ruthe Foushee, University of Chicago

• Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California - Berkeley