Anyone who has ever had to look at a sad child’s face during a parental argument at the kitchen table knows: Few things unsettle children as much as unsorted adult stress. Or the other way around: If you want to ensure the well-being of children, you have to make sure that the parents are doing reasonably well.
A new study from Germany now shows that family stress during the pandemic has increased constantly and over the long term, regardless of restrictions and lockdowns. The stress of the parents is identified as a major risk factor for the psychosocial well-being of the children. On the other hand, stable parent-child relationships were confirmed to be an important resilience factor for the psychological well-being of the children.
The team led by Markus Paulus from the Chair of Developmental Psychology and Educational Psychology at LMU Munich surveyed a total of over 4,000 parents online at four times between spring 2020 and March 2021. The ones in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry The published results not only show that the quality of the parent-child relationship made a decisive difference in how well children got through the pandemic mentally. What is special about them is that they distinguish between longer-term effects of the pandemic on families and lockdown-specific effects.
In families where at least one young child lived, the mood became worse
While certain stress-related effects of the lockdowns (e.g. social loneliness, hyperactivity, sadness) on the children always subsided in the phases of relaxation and only worsened again during the next lockdown (wave-shaped course), the family-related well-being of the children took over overall steadily from all four measurement times (linear progression). On the one hand, the children always recovered in certain areas after strict closing times. Overall, however, the mood in the families in which at least one three- to ten-year-old child was living at the time of the study became worse.
The also demonstrable effect from the first lockdown, that the mood in a few families even improved with the additional time together, did not change the general downward trend.
According to the authors, this indicates the existence of different change processes on an individual and social level. For example, while contact with peers was easy to reestablish after each closing time and the mood in this area brightened, the stress within the family lessened less. At the same time, the researchers assume that a good, low-stress parent-child relationship was able to buffer the effects of the pandemic.
The results are not surprising, and the study, like most pandemic surveys, suffers from the fact that only parents were asked – and not the children themselves or other caregivers. At the same time, the risk factor of parental stress is often neglected when looking at children and young people. Various studies have shown that mothers in particular have felt particularly stressed since the beginning of the pandemic.