Association between Mothers’ Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Daily Lives and Their Children’s Social Competence: Sequential Mediating Effects of Mothers’ Social Connectedness and Parenting Stress

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on daily lives and their children’s social competence, as perceived by mothers, through sequential mediating effects of the mothers’ social connectedness and parenting stress.Methods: Participants were 315 mothers with children 3-5 years old in Korea. An online survey using a questionnaire was conducted and preliminary analyses were carried out as descriptive statistics using SPSS Statistics 22.0. Research models were examined by confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, and bootstrapping analysis was conducted using Mplus 8.4 program.Results: The results revealed that the COVID-19 impact on daily life as perceived by mothers did not show a significant direct effect on their children’s social competence. However, it had a significant indirect effect on children’s social competence through the mothers’ parenting stress, but a nonsignificant effect through the mothers’ social connectedness. Additionally, it had an indirect effect on children’s social competence through sequential mediating effects of both, the mothers’ social connectedness and parenting stress.Conclusion: These findings empirically confirmed the relationships among the perceived impact of COVID-19, mothers’ social connectedness, parenting stress, and their children’s social competence. Furthermore, the results illustrated that high levels of COVID-19 impact on daily lives could lead to low levels of children’s social competence through the effects of mothers’ social connectedness and parenting stress, suggesting a comprehensive framework of social contextual and parenting socio-psychological factors to understand children’s social competence. Therefore, the findings could help to identify points of effective intervention for children’s social-emotional development within a context of mother-child relation in the current epidemic situations.