"Faith, Family, and Friends": Pandemic-Related Coping in Parents of Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes

The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique stressors for parents of youth with chronic health conditions including type 1 diabetes (T1D), such as managing youths' diabetes self-management demands without usual routines, changes in interactions with health care system, and concerns about increased health risks related to COVID-19 exposure. While data have been published on how adolescents with T1D coped with pandemic-related stress, little is known about their parents' perspectives. To fill this gap, we explored parents' coping strategies.

At the baseline of a multisite trial of a psychosocial intervention for adolescents with T1D, parents answered an open-ended question, "What is helping you through the pandemic?" A multidisciplinary qualitative research team used thematic analysis to code, analyze responses, and generate themes and explored patterns by gender, study site, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status indices.

Eighty-nine parents (89% female, 18% Hispanic/Latinx, 7% non-Hispanic Black/African American, 70% non-Hispanic White) provided text responses to the qualitative question. We generated six themes: safety practices, social efforts, maintaining a positive perspective, efforts to distract, cognitive avoidance, and religious/spiritual coping. The spiritual/religious coping theme was more common among Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx parents. There were no other demographic group patterns for the other themes.

Themes aligned with primary control, secondary control, and disengagement coping strategies of the control-based model of coping. Religious and spiritual coping represented an additional coping category that was especially common in marginalized groups. During stressful times, pediatric psychologists should attend to parental coping and consider cultural factors in relation to parental well-being.