Broadly, this project is motivated by the questions: during the early pandemic did families manage to find and procure the supports they needed? Was access to material and psychosocial supports related to risky parenting behaviors?
To answer these questions, I launched an online survey in mid-April 2020. The sample population was from seven midwestern states, as they all had similar covid-related policies and at the time had formed a consortium to coordinate reopening plans. I was interested in the experiences of mothers of children under the age of 6, as children need the most care at these developmental ages, and because women are typically the primary caregivers of young children.
I used the survey research firm Qualtrics, who recruited potential respondents from online panels, to help manage the study. Potential respondents were given a short screening survey and if eligible, asked to participate in the study. From this, I yielded a sample of 720 mothers. Mothers were asked to respond to both close-ended and open-ended questions about their experiences.
In the first paper from this project, published at Child Abuse & Neglect, found that:
The number of negative Covid-related impacts on the household was positively associated with parenting stress, very weakly associated with risky parenting behavior, in bivariate and multivariate models
Measures of low socio-economic resources were not systematically related to parenting stress and risky parenting behavior
Resource use was related to inattentive parenting, but not parenting stress or harsh parenting
Parenting stress did fully mediate the weak relationship between Covid-related impacts and risky parenting behavior
The second paper from this project is in production. This qualitative analysis finds that:
While mothers were trying to make sense of the dramatic changes to time caused by covid, they largely saw themselves as managing alone. Unsupported.
Mothers drew on ideals of “good mothering” that were in tension with the change in time caused by the pandemic. This commitment to achieving a status of a “good mother” was expressed through anxiety-focused mothering, which reflected expected behaviors and attitudes, including: guilt about lack of engaged and active mothering, worries about child development and children “falling behind.”
Together unsupported mothering and anxiety-focused mothering produced strained mothering.
Strained mothers were suffering from: extreme fatigue, loss of patience (inability to live up to good mother standards), and harmful parenting practices (spanking).
There are a few implications of these results. First, parenting stress matters for risky parenting & resources matter for inattentive parenting. Second, null findings with respect to sociodemographic variables are important. Mothers of different employment statuses, including those who were recently laid off or who chose to stay at home, generally did not have significantly different probabilities of parenting stress or risky behaviors. Contrary to theory, similar null results were found across other socio-demographic variables and in the qualitative analyses. These null findings suggest that crises have effects that encompass family systems, potentially raising parenting stress levels in many groups that are typically considered low-risk for child maltreatment. Results have implications for scholarship on parenting stress, the targeting of social supports to mothers of young children, and rapid interventions to reduce stress, such as the stimulus check relief program.
References:
Blumenthal, A. (2023). A bad time for kids in lockdown: The relationship between negative pandemic events, parenting stress, and maltreatment related parenting behaviors. Child Abuse & Neglect. 138(April).
Blumenthal, A. (In preparation). More than just stressed out: Idealized mothering during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.