BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Changes in Family Relationships during the Coronavirus Pandemic: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study

Fri, April 9, 4:30 to 5:30pm EDT (4:30 to 5:30pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

The novel coronavirus pandemic has impacted every level of society. Individuals are reporting higher levels of depression, anxiety and overall distress (Peng et al., 2020; Shanahan et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2020). Therefore, it is probable that family processes and relationships likewise have experienced important changes. This study investigated how parenting practices (i.e., parental knowledge, parental involvement, autonomy granting), parent-child relationship qualities (i.e., mother-child intimacy, father-child intimacy, mother-child conflict, father-child conflict) and sibling relationships (i.e., sibling intimacy, sibling disclosure, sibling conflict) changed from before to during the pandemic. Given the exploratory nature of the study, we offered competing hypotheses. It is possible that stay-at-home orders provided parents with more time to be engaged with their children, which may predict greater knowledge and involvement, which fosters positive parenting and parent-child relationships. Alternatively, simultaneous engagement in multiple roles may stress parents’ resources and limit their ability to engage in positive parenting behaviors and promote more conflictual relationships. Finally, given the ambivalent nature of sibling relationships, we expected that these relationships would show more intimacy and conflict. Importantly, we explored whether critical personal and contextual factors modified the level of observed changes.
Participants included one parent and two adolescent-aged children from 682 families (2,046 participants) participating in an ongoing longitudinal study. Annual survey data for Time 1 of this study were collected between March 2019 and March 2020 and a special assessment of individual and family experiences during the pandemic was conducted between May 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020. At Time 1, older siblings (51% female) averaged 15.67 (SD = .68) years old, younger siblings (48% female) averaged 13.14 (SD = 1.11) years, and parents (85% mothers; 97% were children’s biological parents) averaged 45.15 (SD = 5.37) years. The same established measures were used to index family relationship processes at both occasions of measurement. A series of two-wave latent change score models were utilized to investigate how family relationships changed from before to during pandemic shutdowns. Clustering of siblings within family was accounted for via multilevel structural equation models, all of which were fit in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017).
Results indicated that parents became more knowledgeable about children’s activities, more educationally involved with children, and generally granted children more autonomy during the pandemic (see Table 1). Youth reported less conflict with fathers over time, particularly with non-married fathers (see Table 2). Sibling relationship qualities did not change from before to during the pandemic.
In general, findings suggest that parents engaged in more positive parenting behaviors during the pandemic, perhaps the result of increased time spent together at home. Further, with the exception of father-youth conflict, which declined over time, levels of conflict in both mother-child and sibling relationships remained stable suggesting that potential COVID-related stressors did not spillover into these family relationships. Combined with relative stability in parent-youth and sibling intimacy and self-disclosure, our results suggest that in families with multiple adolescents, both parents and youth adapted positively to challenges they may have faced and demonstrated positive family functioning.

Authors