Adolescent and Maternal Anxiety Symptoms Decreased but Depressive Symptoms Increased before to during COVID‐19 Lockdown

Abstract

Mothers ( n = 155) and their adolescent children ( n = 146; aged 12–13 at pre‐COVID wave [Time 1, September 2019 to March 2020]) repeated measures of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and details about the impacts of the pandemic and social distancing at Time 2 (May‐June 2020). Average slopes of mother and adolescent depression increased but anxiety symptoms decreased from Time 1 to Time 2. Adolescent decreases in anxiety symptoms were driven by males, whereas depression increase was driven by females. Adolescents’ depression slopes were steeper for those who reported more negative changes. Implications are discussed relative to findings from other regions and later phases of the pandemic.

Adolescence Amid a Pandemic: Short‐ and Long‐Term Implications

“…Throughout, we integrate the voices of adolescents drawn from a study of 44 student interviews conducted in the summer of 2020 in the southern United States (Benner, 2021). 1 The Critical Need for a Broad Perspective Studies from this special issue parallel those in the larger literature documenting a negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for youth mental health (Alt, Reim, & Walper, 2021;Hollenstein, Colasante, & Lougheed, 2021;van Loon et al, 2021;Miconi et al, 2021;Romm, Park, Hughes, & Gentzler, 2021), including suicidal ideation (Hutchinson et al, 2021) and loneliness (Janssens et al, 2021;Sabato, Abraham, & Kogut, 2021). These effects, though not always found particularly for studies of youth in the earliest months of the pandemic lockdown (Barendse et al, 2021;De France, Hancock, Stack, Serbin, & Hollenstein, 2021), appear strongest for youth at greatest risk (Hussong, Midgette, Thomas, Coffman, & Cho, 2021;Hutchinson et al, 2021).…”

The Impact of the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Adolescent Emotional, Social, and Academic Adjustment

“…The levels of stress and trauma in those adolescents are likely to be higher, and this has been consistently linked to adverse development, academic achievement, health outcomes, and risk for exposure to violence (Sapienza & Masten, 2011 ). Indeed, adolescents who reported more negative changes reported stronger increases in depressive symptoms (Hollenstein et al., 2021 ), and specific living arrangements, pandemic‐related stressor accumulation, and a lack of adaptive coping strategies were associated with during‐pandemic self‐injury and domestic violence (Steinhoff et al., 2021 ). Also, experiences of discrimination and marginalization and lack of resources were related to mental health problems during the pandemic (Miconi et al., 2021 ).…”

“…In terms of emotional adjustment and psychopathology, the impact of the pandemic was found to differ across the type of problems: From before to during the first 6 months of the pandemic, adolescent depression and negative affect increased (Hollenstein, Colasante, & Lougheed, 2021; Romm, Park, Hughes, & Gentzler, 2021), but anxiety symptoms (Hollenstein et al., 2021), daily‐life irritability (Janssens et al., 2021), and self‐reported internalizing problems decreased (Bernasco, Nelemans, van der Graaff, & Branje, 2021). Among Swiss young adults, the prevalence of self‐injury did not change between the first lockdown and post‐lockdown, yet domestic violence increased in males (Steinhoff et al., 2021).…”

COVID-19 Stressors and Latinx Adolescents’ Mental Health Symptomology and School Performance: A Prospective Study

“…In an effort to identify factors that might mitigate stress impacts, this study also investigated the degree to which negative impacts of COVID stressors on Latinx adolescent adjustment were mitigated by adolescent perceptions of parental support. As pandemic-related changes in mental health may differ for adolescent boys versus girls (DeFrance et al, 2021 , Hollenstein et al, 2021 , Magson et al, 2021 ), analytic models tested for the significance of gender differences in pathways from COVID stressors to changes in adolescent adjustment. By learning about how pandemic-related stressors have affected Latinx adolescents, the present study advances knowledge about how experiences of adversity within families matter for adjustment during the early and middle adolescent years.…”

“…Empirical evidence for the pandemic’s negative impacts on adolescents has not been uniform across studies (Collier et al, 2021 ; Hollenstein et al, 2021 ). Among a sample of 9- to 15-year-olds in New Haven, Connecticut, for example, adolescents’ negative affect increased but their positive affect remained unchanged from before to after the pandemic’s onset (through early June of 2020).…”