Deviations in stress and support: Associations with parenting emotions across the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 37(7), Oct 2023, 1072-1082; doi:10.1037/fam0001138Stress is a potent disruptor of parents’ emotional well-being and interactions with their children. In the context of the early months of the unfolding pandemic, parents’ stress likely fluctuated, with downstream impacts on their parenting experiences. The sample consisted of 72 Latina mothers who participated in a 15–20-min phone interview roughly once a month between March 2020 and January 2021. Mothers were asked about their experiences of stress, the quality of partner support, and their emotional experience of parenting. Analyses revealed that mothers’ experiences of stress were high at the beginning of the pandemic and slowly decreased as time went on, though this decline eventually leveled off. Partner support and mothers’ emotional experiences of parenting, on the other hand, did not change across the first 10 months of the pandemic. Collectively, the within and between analyses revealed that stress (individually), and stress and support (interactively) were associated with mothers’ emotional experiences while interacting with their children. Between-subjects analyses revealed greater stress was associated with greater negative emotions during parenting, though support did not buffer this association. Within-subjects analyses revealed a quadratic association between stress and positive parenting emotions, such that at lower levels of stress, increases in stress were associa...
Source: Journal of Family Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research