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Relationships Among Parenting Stress and Well-Being, COVID-19 Information Management, and Children's COVID-19 Fear
Dianna M Boone1, Sarah Stromberg1, Alyssa Fritz1
1Center for Behavioral Health, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, St. Petersburg, FL.
Objective:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, caregivers who are facing high stress levels and decreased emotional well-being may parent their children differently. Certain children are experiencing greater fear in response to COVID-19, and research is needed to identify parenting behaviors significantly linked with children's COVID-19 fear. The purpose of this article was to evaluate whether the association between parenting stress and children's COVID-19 fear could be explained by parents' COVID-19 information management and emotional well-being.
Methods:
Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The sample consisted of 595 caregivers of children during the COVID-19 pandemic; 40.0% men, 69.2% non-Latinx White, 12.1% Black, 10.1% Latinx, 6.6% Asian, and <2% others. Children had an average age of 11.3 years. Parents completed self-report measures.
Results:
The bootstrapped confidence interval (0.040, 0.148) for the indirect effect (0.090) revealed that parent emotional well-being significantly mediated the relation between parenting stress and children's COVID-19 fear. In addition, parent management of children's COVID-19 knowledge significantly mediated the relation between parenting stress and children's COVID-19 fear.
Conclusion:
We found that the combined effect of parents' emotional well-being and parents' management of children's COVID-19 knowledge significantly mediated the positive relation between parenting stress and children's COVID-19 fear. Based on our findings, once parents' parenting stress is decreased and their well-being increases, parents may be more likely to provide children with developmentally appropriate and accurate COVID-19 information.
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