COVID-19 and Parental Emotion Regulation

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused families to experience a wider range of physical and psychosocial stressors. The pandemic has resulted in disruptions in health services (World Health Organization, 2020) and increased distress over contracting the disease or losing family members (Barzilay et al., 2020). The COVID-19 containment measures, such as quarantine, isolation, mandated physical and social distancing and economic lockdown, have restricted families’ access to resources and support systems, and families are faced with loss of childcare, financial instability, and burden of homeschooling (Brooks et al., 2020; Carroll et al., 2020; Fegert, Vitiello, Plener, & Clemens, 2020; Stark, White, Rotter, & Basu, 2020). As families are exposed to chronic stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they may be at elevated risk for adverse mental health outcomes (Gruber et al., 2020). In particular, youth’s mental health could be significantly impacted by the pandemic (Gruber et al., 2020; Guessoum et al., 2020). Indeed, children and adolescents have reported elevated levels of anxiety and depression since the COVID-19 outbreak (Duan et al., 2020) and adolescents reported higher prevalence of depression and anxiety than the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic (Zhou et al., 2020). A study that examined the impact of the previous outbreaks (e.g., H1N1, SARS) on mental health revealed that 30% of children who had been isolated or quarantined met criteria for PTSD based on parental reports (Sprang & Silman, 2013). Thus, it is vital to further explore protective factors that can mitigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth’s psychopathology. Specifically, parents’ capacities to regulate negative affect during stressful life events may moderate the association between pandemic-related stressors and development of psychopathology in youths. Parental emotion regulation difficulties are associated with child’s internalizing problems (Han & Shaffer, 2013) and emotional difficulties (Zahn-Waxler, Duggal, & Gruber, 2002). One study (Platt, Williams, & Ginsburg, 2016) demonstrated that parents who exhibited excessive worries about their child, which indicates a failure to regulate their own emotions, mediated the association between stressful life events and child anxiety. Also, parents with emotion regulation difficulties may struggle to provide supportive family environment for their child. A recent study (Brown, Doom, Lechuga-Peña, Watamura, & Koppels, 2020) reported that parents who perceived higher levels of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely to be abusive and less likely to be supportive to their child. These findings suggest that parents who fail to cope effectively with their own stress may struggle to provide support for their child, potentially leading to youth’s adverse mental health outcomes. Parental emotion regulation may be also linked to the development of child’s emotion regulation, which have important implications for youth’s mental health. Indeed, difficulties with emotion regulation have been identified as a well-established mechanism linking chronic stress with psychopathology development for children and adolescents (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010; McLaughlin & Hatzenbuehler, 2009; Weissman et al., 2019). Thus, we explore how parents’ capacities to cope with pandemic-related-stress, specifically parental emotion regulation, impact child’s psychopathology. The current study aims to investigate how exposure to COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors relates to child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology and parental emotion regulation. We also plan to examine how parental emotion regulation relates to child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology during the COVID-19 pandemic. We lastly will explore the mediating role of parental psychopathology and child emotion regulation in the association between exposure to pandemic-related stressors and child internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.