Abstract
The Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown have profoundly impacted families’ daily life, challenging their psychological resilience. Our study aimed to investigate the immediate psychological consequences of the pandemic on Italian parents and children focusing on internalizing and post-traumatic symptoms. We also wanted to explore the impact of possible risk and resilience factors, e.g., lifestyle and behaviors, emotional and cognitive beliefs, on parents and children’s reaction to the emergency distress. An online survey was administered during the country’s nationwide lockdown to 721 Italian parents of at least one child aged between 6 and 18 years. The respondent completed the survey for himself/herself and his/her child. The survey included socio-demographic items and validated questionnaires on parents’ post-traumatic stress symptoms, depression and anxiety levels, and on children’s internalizing problems. Parents were asked to fill the questionnaires twice: once referring to the current emergency condition and once recalling how they and their child felt a few months before Covid-19 outbreak. Multiple regression analyses showed that specific demographic characteristics (i.e., sex and age) and psychological factors of children and parents, such as fear of contagion and the opportunity to think about possible secondary positive effects of the pandemic, had a predictive value on the presence of internalizing symptoms of both parents and children. Moreover, parents’ behaviors during the lockdown period (i.e., employment status and sport practiced) were significantly related to their own internalizing symptoms; these symptoms, in turn, had a strong and positive predictive value on children’s internalizing problems. Besides, analyses of variance showed that internalizing symptoms of parents and children were significantly higher during the Covid-19 pandemic than before it started. In addition to showing a direct effect of the pandemic on the psychological health of parents and children, the present results also give a series of important information on how parents perceive, and therefore influence, their children in this period of emergency. Our findings thus highlight the urgent need to provide parents with adequate support to take care of their own psychological wellbeing and to help their children coping with the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic.
Highlights
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov2 has led to a global health emergency with alarming implications, for individual and collective health, and for emotional and social functioning (Dubey et al, 2020; Pfefferbaum and North, 2020)
Referring to the cut-off and norming groups for these questionnaires (IES-R: Creamer et al, 2003; Wang et al, 2020; HADS: Zigmond and Snaith, 1983; Costantini et al, 1999; CBCL 6-18: Achenbach, 1991; Achenbach and Rescorla, 2001; Frigerio, 2001) and considering the questionnaires filled in by parents with reference to the current Covid-19 health emergency, the data showed that the mean scores for post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression symptoms of parents and internalizing problems of children were within normal ranges when compared against normative data
We focused on internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, of the responding members of the parenting couples who evaluated their own symptoms and those of their children aged between 6 and 18 years
Summary
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov has led to a global health emergency with alarming implications, for individual and collective health, and for emotional and social functioning (Dubey et al, 2020; Pfefferbaum and North, 2020). As confirmed cases approached 110,000 patients across over 100 countries, the Covid-19 outbreak has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020, Situation Report-51, 11th March 2020). One country after another adopted strict measures to limit the spread of the viral pneumonia, such as physical-distancing, and temporary closure of schools, universities and non-essential workplaces. The outbreak and the consequent lockdown had a profound economic and social impact and, as current literature is revealing, they significantly affected the mental health of general population: subsyndromal mental health concerns, such as depressive and anxiety symptoms, seem to be a common response to the pandemic (Rajkumar, 2020; Wang et al, 2020)
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