Parenting Stress, COVID-19 Stress, and Children’s Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Parenting during COVID

Abstract

Media reports early in the COVID-19 pandemic focused on parents’ stress resulting from pivoting to caring for children full-time. Reports also focused on children’s increased screen time because parents were attempting to continue pre-pandemic routines (e.g., working full-time), but without childcare or school to occupy children’s time. Parenting stress (i.e., distress associated with the demands of parenting) is related to children’s media use, both pre-pandemic (McDaniel et al., 2020; Seguin et al., 2021) and peri-pandemic (Kroshus et al., 2022), perhaps because parents experiencing high levels of parenting stress use media to occupy children’s time while they are completing other tasks (Dore et al., 2021; Elias & Sulkin, 2019). This study addresses two limitations of prior research. First, although it is commonly assumed that parenting stress triggers children’s increased media use at a given timepoint, it is undetermined how this dynamic unfolds over time. For example, earlier parenting stress could contribute to later media use if, once media habits are established, they are difficult to change. Increased media use could also potentially increase parenting stress over time due to parent-child conflict over media use limits. Second, it is unclear how COVID-19 stress specifically (i.e., distress associated with effects of the pandemic and shutdowns) relates to media use. Parents may use media to occupy children when they are too anxious or distracted to have positive interactions.

Parents of 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 303; Mchild age= 5.37 years, SD = 0.82) were recruited online primarily via Research Match. Parents from 40 U.S. states completed online surveys in May-June 2020 (Time 1), six months later (Time 2), and one year later (Time 3). Children were 82% White, 55% female, and 85% were attending school prior to the pandemic. Most parents were mothers (81%), most were married (84%), and most were working part-time or full-time (78%). At each time, parents completed the Parenting Daily Hassles Scale (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990), the Reponses to Stress (COVID-19) scale (Compas, 2020), and children’s media use during a typical weekday on each of five devices. We focused on weekday media use as this is the time when children experienced the most change in daily routines due to loss of childcare and school. Only Time 1 data have been analyzed thus far, although all waves will be presented at the conference, including interrelations among parenting stress, COVID-19 stress, and children’s media use over time.

Controlling for covariates, parenting stress, but not COVID-19 stress, was significantly related to media use (Table 1). However, there was a significant interaction between parenting stress and media use such that this relation was stronger when COVID-19 stress was also high (see Figure 1). Results suggest that parenting stress was related to increased media use during the pandemic and that COVID-19 stress exacerbated this relation. Because excessive media use may be associated with negative outcomes (Trott et al., 2022), it is vital to identify potential risk factors. Interventions or policies that reduce stress among parents may reduce children’s media use and contribute to family well-being.

Authors

• Virginia L Tompkins, The Ohio State University at Lima
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer M Kowalsky, The Ohio State University at Newark

• Rebecca Dore, Ohio State University

• Lauren Grothaus, The Ohio State University at Lima