Fathering amid COVID-19: Do experiences with the pandemic overshadow other factors associated with emotion socialization?

• In Event: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Emotional Well-being of Caregivers and Children

Abstract

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many stressors to family well-being and child development, including increased parental stress and rapid changes to childcare, schooling, and employment (Brown et al., 2020; Cluver et al., 2020). Parent stress, including stress directly related to parenting, is strongly related to less supportive parenting (Shaffer et al., 2012), as well as less supportive responses to children’s emotion (Denham et al., 2007). Yet, the vast majority of this research is on maternal, rather than paternal contributions to emotion socialization. Little research has examined how father’s parenting stress, mental health concerns, and own emotion regulation impact father’s socialization of children’s emotions. This study will 1) explore fathers’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) examine whether the impact of COVID-19 relates to father’s socialization of children’s emotions over and above several risk factors (e.g., fathers’ parenting stress, emotion regulation, etc.). This study will utilize a racially/ethnically diverse sample of fathers, contextualizing these timely issues with often understudied participants.

Methods Participants will include cisgender fathers (estimated n=350) in the US who have regular contact with their 6-10 year-old child (i.e., at least regular visitation). This project is currently under IRB review. Participants will be recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and at least 50% of the sample will be non-White participants. Recruitment is anticipated to occur October to December 2020, followed by data analysis during early 2021. Father’s COVID-19 pandemic experiences will be assessed using the CIS (Stoddard & Koffman, 2020), emotion socialization using the CCNES (Fabes et al., 2002), parenting stress with the PSI-4-SF (Abidin, 2012), emotion regulation via the DERS-16 (Bjureberg et al., 2016), and trauma symptoms via the PCL-5 (Weathers et al., 2013). Several sociodemographic factors will also be assessed. For details on study measures, see Table 1.

Results For the first aim, associations between the CIS and key father sociodemographic factors will be explored. This will begin with descriptive statistics, followed by CIS correlations with education, income, social class identification, and number of people in the home, and ANOVAs for CIS and family structure, community type, and father race/ethnicity. For the second aim, hierarchical linear regression analyses will be used to explore whether the CIS relates to a) supportive emotion socialization responses and b) unsupportive emotion socialization responses over and above father parenting stress, emotion regulation, trauma symptoms, and relevant sociodemographic covariates (e.g., income, education, etc.).

Conclusion This study will provide important information about fathering during these unprecedented times and indicate important steps for prevention and intervention. If the impact of COVID-19 on fathers does not relate to emotion socialization over and above other risk factors, this will speak to the importance these risk factors and providing relevant services amid the pandemic. If, however, the impact of COVID-19 demonstrates a stronger relation, this will underscore the importance of addressing the pandemic-related concerns for parenting and children’s development. Furthermore, this study will provide a rich contextual picture of fathers using a diverse and understudied sample, which will contribute to our broader understanding of father’s socialization of children’s emotions.

Authors

• E Cherry, University of Missouri-St. Louis
  Presenting Author

• Emily D. Gerstein, University of Missouri-St. Louis
  Non-Presenting Author