Family functioning and child mental health in the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for risk, resilience, and recovery

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been accompanied by innumerable psychological and socioeconomic problems that are well-established risk factors for psychopathology, underscoring an urgent need to assess: (a) families’ experiences of the pandemic, and (b) trends of mental health symptoms in youth and (c) associated risk and protective factors. The papers presented in this symposium use a diverse set of research methodologies and analytic methods to address these topics in families with children at multiple developmental stages.

The first paper investigates the most salient challenges and concerns for families with young children using a nationally representative survey of the pandemic’s impact on child development. The second paper presents data on anxiety and depression symptoms in high-risk children in early-to-middle childhood throughout the pandemic. This paper identifies family-level adversity and COVID-19-related stressors as predictors of symptom trajectories. Paper three examines pre- and post-COVID-19 internalizing symptoms in two samples (early childhood, adolescence), investigating environmental factors, health behaviors, and gender as sources of risk and resiliency. The final paper examines neurophysiological markers of emotion processing in combination with COVID-19-related stress exposure to predict internalizing symptom changes (pre- to post-pandemic onset) in two prospective longitudinal samples of older adolescents and emerging adults.

The overarching goal of this symposium is to inform our understanding on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families, specifically highlighting mental health symptoms in children. Results of these studies hold implications for policies and interventions to offset the negative psychosocial consequences of this global health crisis.

Sub Unit

• Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Chair

• Meredith Gruhn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• Pandemic Voices of Families: A Structural Topic Modeling Analysis of the RAPID-EC Nationally Representative Survey - Presenting Author: Sara Weston, University of Oregon; Non-Presenting Author: Philip Andrew Fisher, University of Oregon

• Trajectories of anxiety and depressive symptoms in high-risk children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic - Presenting Author: Meredith Gruhn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Machlin, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Summer Motton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Adam Bryant Miller, RTI International; Non-Presenting Author: Helen Milojevich, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Margaret A. Sheridan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Child and Adolescent Mental Health: Risk and Resilience Factors - Presenting Author: Laura Glynn, Chapman University; Non-Presenting Author: Sabrina R. Liu, University of California Irvine Conte Center; Non-Presenting Author: Joan L Luby, Washington University in St. Louis; Non-Presenting Author: Curt Sandman, University of California, Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Tallie Z Baram, UC Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Elysia Davis, University of Denver

• Neurophysiological Indices of Emotion Processing Predict the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Stress on Internalizing Symptoms - Presenting Author: Lindsay Dickey, Vanderbilt University; Non-Presenting Author: Resh Gupta, Vanderbilt University; Non-Presenting Author: Autumn Kujawa, Vanderbilt University