Parenting during COVID-19: Impact on early childhood self-compassion and emotional well-being

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

The primary objective of this research was to identify how positive and negative aspects of children’s emerging self-compassion and general emotional well-being were related to shifts in amounts of time parents spent with their children from before to during the “stay at home” period of the COVID-19 pandemic. While most young children are comforted by their parent’s presence during stress (Bowlby, 1988), research on non-parental care suggests that both excessive (Unemura & Jacobvitz, 2014) and too little non-parental care (Roggman, Langlois, Hubbs-Tait, & Rieser-Danner, 1994) are associated with attachment insecurity. We reasoned that sudden extreme decreases or increases in amount of parental care due to “stay at home” orders would be related to children’s emotional well-being and emerging self-compassion.
We formulated three hypotheses: (1) more time spent with parents would be inversely correlated with child negative self-compassion (e.g., doubts own abilities when attempting something challenging); (2) parental stress would be higher for parents with more extreme shifts in time spent with children; (3) positive emotions/coping for parents (e.g., emotion regulation, mindfulness, empathy) and children (e.g., mindfulness, empathy) would increase and negative emotions/coping for children (e.g., internalizing behavior problems) would decrease for those who transitioned from spending < 10 hours/day before COVID-19 to > 20 hours/day together during COVID-19.
To assess positive and negative aspects of self-compassion, we adapted Neff’s (2003) self-compassion measure to create a parent-report measure, the Self-Compassion Scale for Early Childhood (SCS-EC). Parents (N =170) of children aged 3 to 6 years old were asked how many hours/day they spent with their child before and during the isolation imposed by the pandemic. Parents were also asked about their own self-compassion, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and stress and completed measures of their child’s emotion regulation, empathy, self-esteem, and internalizing behavior problems.
To test hypothesis 1, we calculated correlations between parent time with children and early self-compassion scores. We will test hypotheses 2 and 3 with ANOVAs for the three groups of parents with different pre- to during COVID-19 patterns of time with children: same, increased greatly, and decreased greatly. Table 1 shows an increase in the percentage of parents spending > 20 hours/day with children and a decrease in parents spending < 10 hours/day with children. Tests of hypothesis 1 revealed that, compared to other parents, the 84 parents who reported spending 20 or more hours/day with their child during the “stay at home” period of COVID-19 reported their child to have significantly lower negative self-compassion on the SCS-EC (r = -.23, p = .003).
Tests of the other two hypotheses will reveal how the shifts in parent-child time together from before to during the COVID-19 “stay at home” period qualify the conclusion that more time spent with children during the pandemic is related to lower negative child self-compassion. Our data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed one of our hypotheses. We will be able to test our two other hypotheses about parent stress and parent-child emotional well-being and coping prior to the April 2021 meeting.

Authors

• Jillian LeRae Bailey, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater
  Presenting Author

• Laura Hubbs-Tait, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amy Williamson, Oklahoma State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lucia Ciciolla, Oklahoma State University - Stillwater
  Non-Presenting Author

• Isaac Washburn, Oklahoma State University
  Non-Presenting Author