Parent–adolescent relationship quality as a moderator of links between COVID-19 disruption and reported changes in mothers’ and young adults’ adjustment in five countries.Show others and affiliations
2021 (English)In: Developmental Psychology, ISSN 0012-1649, E-ISSN 1939-0599, Vol. 57, no 10, p. 1648-1666Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented families around the world with extraordinary challenges related to physical and mental health, economic security, social support, and education. The current study capitalizes on a longitudinal, cross-national study of parenting, adolescent development, and young adult competence to document the association between personal disruption during the pandemic and reported changes in internalizing and externalizing behavior in young adults and their mothers since the pandemic began. It further investigates whether family functioning during adolescence 3 years earlier moderates this association. Data from 484 families in five countries (Italy, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States) reveal that higher levels of reported disruption during the pandemic are related to reported increases in internalizing and externalizing behaviors after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic for young adults (Mage = 20) and their mothers in all five countries, with the exception of one association in Thailand. Associations between disruption during the pandemic and young adults’ and their mothers’ reported increases in internalizing and externalizing behaviors were attenuated by higher levels of youth disclosure, more supportive parenting, and lower levels of destructive adolescent-parent conflict prior to the pandemic. This work has implications for fostering parent–child relationships characterized by warmth, acceptance, trust, open communication, and constructive conflict resolution at all times given their protective effects for family resilience during times of crisis.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. Vol. 57, no 10, p. 1648-1666
Keywords [en]
adolescence, COVID-19, adjustment, parenting
National Category
Applied Psychology
Research subject
Child and Youth studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-17989DOI: 10.1037/dev0001236ISI: 000723689000008Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85113474073OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hv-17989DiVA, id: diva2:1624366
Note
This research has been funded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant RO1-HD054805, by National Institute on Drug Abuse Grant P30 DA023026, the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, United States, and an International Research Fellowship at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, United Kingdom, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant 695300-HKADeC-ERC-2015-AdG). The authors note no conflicts of interest. The authors also thank W. Andrew Rothenberg and Madeline M. Carrig for their statistical consultation and advice.
2022-01-042022-01-042022-04-04Bibliographically approved