UC Davis

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families’ daily lives and routines, compromising parents’ and children’s well-being. The field of developmental science is well-equipped to assess the immediate and future consequences of the pandemic on familial dynamics and to use this understanding to bolster family support and recovery initiatives. Within a developmental perspective, the present studies examined the multifaceted implications of the pandemic on U.S. families, specifically regarding economic stress, parental coping, children’s socioemotional developmental, and parenting goals. Study 1 examined how pandemic-induced job loss and associated economic stress spurred parents to engage their children in prosocial activities during shelter-in-place. Despite pandemic-related job loss and economic insecurity, there was a surge in prosocial behavior. Chronically lower socioeconomic status has been associated with adults’ greater prosociality, and it is unclear whether experiencing an acute financial stressor – like the pandemic – would similarly promote prosociality. Pandemic-induced economic stress may have motivated parents to engage their children in prosocial behaviors as a means of coping with the pandemic. The indirect effects model found that more negative employment changes predicted greater economic stress, which in turn predicted more helping activities with children. Parents who reported more helping activities also had better coping skills. These findings suggest that acute, pandemic-induced economic stress prompted parents to encourage their children to engage in prosocial acts, potentially to enhance social support amid pandemic-related stress. Furthermore, assisting others contributed to parents’ overall coping, highlighting pathways to promote well-being during a crisis. Next, Study 2 modelled the development of children’s emotional and behavioral difficulties during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic, exploring how initial status and increasing difficulties directly and indirectly predicted parent’s mental health symptoms via heightened parental burnout. A linear latent growth curve model found that children’s initial total difficulties score was 9.451 with significant variability, and children’s difficulties significantly decreased over 1.5 years. In an indirect effects model, both higher initial total difficulties and increasing difficulties over the pandemic predicted greater parental burnout, subsequently relating to parents’ greater mental health symptoms. While concerns persist regarding children’s adjustment, our results indicate that children’s socioemotional difficulties decreased as the pandemic progressed for this sample of well-resourced families. However, parents of children who experienced many difficulties at the pandemic's outset, or those with increasing difficulties, were vulnerable to parental burnout and compromised mental health. Providing resources to parents of children with challenging behaviors early and throughout a health crisis may alleviate downstream impacts on parental well-being. Finally, Study 3 examined theorized but untested processes in the seminal model of parenting as a goal regulation process (Dix & Branca, 2002) in the context of the Winter 2022 Omicron surge. Within an experimental framework, we examined shifts in parent-centered (PC) and child-centered (CC) goals during pandemic-specific parent-child interactions, while exploring individual differences in parental emotion regulation and metacognition. Results indicated that parents in both the self-focused and child-focused conditions prioritized CC goals and, in response to child sadness, reduced their emphasis on PC goals, and increased their use of warmth-based parenting. Conversely, parents in the child-focused condition amplified the importance of PC goals when facing child anger, combined with increased power assertion behavior. Findings supported the hypothesis that parenting goals are dynamic, influenced by the interplay of parental focus and children’s emotional cues. The study underscores the importance of parental emotional regulation abilities in goal flexibility, highlighting that well-regulated parents adapt their goals more effectively, especially in the context of a pandemic. This research contributes to the understanding of parenting as a responsive, goal-regulation process, emphasizing the potential for interventions that bolster parental emotion regulation capabilities. Overall, the collected research emphasizes the complex aspects of how families managed during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing child, parent, and family functioning during a catastrophic event. By examining the intersection of economic stress, parenting cognitions and behaviors, parental mental health, and child developmental trajectories, this dissertation offers novel insights that could inform both future research and policy.