Resilience of Families with Children Across COVID-19: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Stability and Change

The current mixed methods study builds on previous research on family resilience during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to better understand family risk and resilience across one year from ~3 months to ~15 months post-COVID-19-pandemic onset in a sample of well-resourced families, elucidating how the chronic nature of the pandemic impacted family functioning, using data from both summer 2020 and summer 2021.

Children of 265 U.S. parents (258 mothers) were 2.7-14.1 years old in 2020 (51.7% girls, 83.9% White; primarily middle-to-high income families). Parent surveys examined perceptions of the pandemic, predictors of parent and child psychological distress, and changes to work and family life from 2020 to 2021.

We found that, qualitatively, families were continuing to exhibit resilience in 2021, with many adaptations in parent, family, and child lives including parental divorce, moving the child to homeschool, and family members finding alone time. Regression analyses showed that the best quantitative predictors of 2021 parent and child psychological distress were 2020 parent and child psychological distress, followed by 2020 COVID-19 daily impact for 2021 child psychological distress (controlling for social desirability, family income, parent education, race, and number of children in the home).

Overall, findings indicate that even well-resourced families were continuing to experience social disruption in their daily lives in 2021, though to a lesser extent than in 2020, showing evidence of continued family resilience over a year into the pandemic.