Trajectories and Associations Between Maternal Depressive Symptoms, Household Chaos and Children's Adjustment through the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Four-Wave Longitudinal Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures have adversely affected the lives of people worldwide, raising concern over the pandemic's mental health consequences. Guided by a systemic model of family functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic (Prime et al., 2020), the current study aimed to examine how caregiver well-being (i.e., maternal depressive symptoms) and family organization (i.e., household chaos) are related to longitudinal trajectories of children's emotional and behavioral problems. Data were collected at four time points during and after home lockdown periods. Mothers of children (N = 230; 55% male) between the ages of two to five years were asked to complete questionnaires via an Israeli online research platform. Results indicated that emotional and behavioral problems, household chaos, and maternal depressive symptoms were the highest during the first lockdown assessment and dropped in the post-lockdown periods. Multilevel models further revealed that at the between-participants level, maternal depressive symptoms and household chaos positively predicted children's emotional and behavioral problems. At the within-participants level, household chaos fluctuations positively predicted fluctuations in child behavioral but not emotional problems. Our findings suggest that lockdowns have adverse effects on both maternal and child mental health. Screening for depressive symptoms among mothers of young children and maintaining household structure are important targets for future interventions to assist parents in navigating the multiple challenges brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Screen media exposure and behavioral adjustment in early childhood during and after COVID-19 home lockdown periods

“…In the current study, mothers may have often used media to regulate children's distress in the initial stages of the pandemic to alleviate their own negative feelings caused by the exhaustion and burnout associated with the changes in their parental roles. However, by the third lockdown mothers may have been less distressed ( Gordon-Hacker et al, 2022 ) and were able to employ more adaptive strategies to regulate children's distress.…”

Short-term and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on child psychological well-being: a four-wave longitudinal study

“…Importantly, the present study is among the first to rely on an A (lockdown)–B (relaxation)–B (relaxation)–A (lockdown) design constituting a naturalistic ecological approach to more systematically investigate effects of lockdowns on child mental health. While findings from previous studies comparing pre-pandemic to lockdown [ 77 ] or lockdown to further relaxations [ 6 , 19 , 66 ] or lockdowns [ 7 , 27 , 62 – 64 ] provide important first evidence on lockdown effects, the present ecological design with different conditions takes an important first step to differentiate short-term effects from long-term effects of the pandemic.…”

“…In the first year of the pandemic, strict lockdowns and periods of loosened restrictions followed each other and presented major challenges for child well-being and psychosocial adjustment (e.g., [ 9 , 10 , 58 ]. While increasing (longitudinal) literature reports on child mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., [ 6 , 11 , 19 , 25 , 27 , 46 , 62 , 68 ], we know little about the differences between long-term effects (i.e., of the pandemic generally independently of lockdowns) and short-term effects (i.e., specific effects of lockdowns). This requires longitudinal work spanning multiple alternations of lockdowns and relaxations.…”

“…Previous longitudinal work on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (for meta-analyses, see [ 45 , 60 ]) demonstrated reduced psychological well-being from pre-pandemic to lockdown [ 77 ] with recoveries from lockdown to subsequent relaxations [ 6 , 19 , 66 ] but reductions in child well-being from the first to subsequent lockdowns [ 7 , 27 , 62 – 64 ]. Other work reports positive effects of children’ and youth’s pandemic-related stressors during the first lockdown on externalizing and internalizing symptoms later in the pandemic [ 67 ].…”

“…Thus, the current study offers a novel methodological perspective on understanding trajectories of child psychological well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in two ways: (1) almost all previous longitudinal studies employed a pre-pandemic–A design [ 77 ], an A–B design [ 6 , 19 , 66 ], or an A–A–B design [ 7 , 27 , 62 – 64 ]. Our study is among the first to employ an ecological design (A–B–B–A) with two changes between lockdown and relaxation; (2) previous longitudinal research (see above) does not use two relaxation periods to control for confounding factors that could impact improvements from lockdown to relaxation (e.g., seasonality).…”