Abstract
The social distancing measures and the related closure of education institutions have confronted young families, in particular, with various challenges. Additional risk factors such as an insecure or even unresolved maternal attachment representation may affect mental health of mothers and their children in times of increased stress such as during the ongoing pandemic. We aimed to analyze the interplay between maternal attachment representation and mother’s and children’s mental health before and during the SARS-CoV-2-pandemic. 91 mothers completed a “SARS-CoV-2 pandemic survey” examining the pandemic-related stress of their families including their own depressive symptomology and their children’s mental health. Our mediation analysis demonstrates that the mothers’ depressive symptomology significantly and fully mediated the relationship between maternal attachment representations and children’s mental health during the pandemic. In contrast, the indirect effect of the maternal attachment representation on children’s mental health before the pandemic through the depressive symptoms experienced by the mothers before the pandemic did not reach significance alongside the total and direct effect. The quality of the maternal attachment representation, promoted by childhood maltreatment, seems to be one relevant risk factor for the mothers’ and children’s mental health during a stressful time like a pandemic. The risk for mothers to develop depressive symptoms in times of a pandemic is significantly influenced by their current representation of previous attachment experiences. In addition, the mental well-being of mothers showed a considerable influence on the children’s mental health during a pandemic. The results underline the necessity to consider unique needs of family members and to offer specific support in the current crisis focusing on attachment issues.
Highlights
The current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has been imposing numerous restrictions and challenges for everyone in the world for over one year
Since depressive symptoms were repeatedly recorded throughout the whole project, this study focused on depressive symptoms
Other studies demonstrated that depressive symptomology was associated with insecure-preoccupied and unresolved attachment representations (Dagan et al, 2018; Chow & Ruhl, 2014, BauriedlSchmidt et al, 2017). In accordance with this finding, we found in our study that maternal attachment representation significantly related to the severity of depressive symptoms experienced by mothers both before and during the pandemic
Summary
The current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has been imposing numerous restrictions and challenges for everyone in the world for over one year. Young families have been faced with various challenges and measures. They were faced with recommendations for increasing physical distance, sudden closure of schools and childcare, the loss of community programs and jobs, increasing pressure from recession or unemployment, home schooling, lack of social support among others, from grandparents, which require them all to find solutions to the emerging problems (Fegert et al, 2020; Halvorsen et al, 2020; Johns Hopkins University, 2021). We might assume that the ongoing pandemic will have social, emotional and cognitive effects that we do not yet know in detail but can foresee (Feinberg et al, 2021)
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