How families matter for health inequality during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

We theorize that the social conditions surrounding the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic have the potential to increase the importance of families for health and widen existing inequalities. We suggest three primary tenets important for understanding families and health during COVID‐19. First, risks of specific COVID‐19 outcomes and other health problems are unevenly distributed across families. Second, how families impact health during the COVID‐19 pandemic is conditional on public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events. Third, many health inequalities driven by racism, sexism, classism, and other oppressive societal forces are amplified during COVID‐19, but the extent to which this is occurring is shaped by families and by the public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events that also impact families and health. As health disparities continue to emerge from this pandemic, we call on researchers and policymakers to pay attention to the multiple ways that families matter.

Impact of the 2020 pandemic of COVID-19 on Families with School-aged Children in the United States: Roles of Income Level and Race

“…Because of the cross-sectional nature of this observational study, causation can never be exactly known. It is possible that the racial and income differences observed in this study might be partially attributed to other social and political events and conflicts (e.g., police brutality, racism, Black Lives Matter Movement) that were simultaneously occurring in the U.S. in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic (Thomeer et al, 2020). More research is needed to understand the complexity of the dynamic interplay of social, political, and economic factors in families' lives during a pandemic.…”

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Mental Health and Mental Health Care During The COVID-19 Pandemic

“…As theorized by the stress process model [ 25 ], different levels of exposure to various stressors together with access to resources (e.g., financial, social) create a process of stress that in turn has deleterious consequences on well-being. The pandemic itself brought with it many stressors and reduced people’s resources, limiting availability of social support and inducing financial insecurity [ 2 , 26 ]. Following from the stress process model, we expect that the greater levels of stressors would contribute to worse mental health generally, as already well-documented [ 3 – 5 ].…”

Children's Rights in The Perspective of Primary School Teachers in The Period COVID-19 Epidemic

“…During the epidemic, children consume less fruit and vegetables and reach healthy meals less (Josephson et al, 2021;Patrick et al, 2020;Tar & Atik, 2021), and they face childhood obesity Pietrabissa et al, 2021;Couper-Kenney & Riddell, 2021), Type-1 diabetes in children has increased due to lifestyle changes (Brener et al, 2020), depending on the education and income level of the family. Moreover, they live in homes with irregular working environments (Thomeer, Yahirun, & Colón-López, 2020), crowded and inadequate home environments increase the risk of COVID-19 and infectious diseases in children (Freedson, 2021;Suleman et al, 2020). Westrupp et al (2021), in the research of low-income families; It was found that while working from home, they had difficulties in providing care to children due to financial insufficiency.…”