These inconsistent findings highlight the need for more comprehensive research to understand the nuanced impacts of social support on children’s well-being during the pandemic. However, pandemics and other crises may reshape how social support influences children’s well-being. These findings underscore the critical role of life stressors and social support in shaping children’s well-being during crises and highlight the need for targeted interventions to strengthen social connections and support systems. In this sense, tangible parental financial support, unlike family emotional support, may be viewed as incurring a debt (e.g., helping parents out in the future). Second, the correlations between family emotional support and both young adult outcomes were positive and significant, while there was a weak and negative correlation between parental financial support and positive outlook. The young adults in our sample reported low to moderate levels of negative financial impact, moderate to high levels of family emotional support, and moderate levels of parental financial support, financial wellbeing, and positive outlook.
Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Family Functioning
Removing children’s contact with school staff minimises their visibility and increases the danger of unidentified harm. Although some children then struggled with a return to full-sized classes when schools fully reopened, many were happy to regain the social benefits of school and to reconnect with friends. For a lot of these children, it was a positive experience, and they benefited from the smaller teacher–pupil ratios that resulted from fewer children being in the classroom. Homes have used various other methods to support children in returning to schools https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/2025-us-tornadoes-and-severe-storms/ and to catch up on missed education.
- A list of some voluntary organisations who offer support to people with a disability and or family carers.
- A previous study reported that on average families experienced approximately nine events or impacts related to COVID-19 (Kazak et al., 2021).
- In line with other research , the first-time mothers in this study reported that they were not validated in their desire for mental support.
Despite the Pandemic, Many Parents Report Family Closeness
Our results also confirm prior research examining whether and how the pandemic’s effects vary by gender. An interesting pathway for future research may be to explore whether similar mechanisms are found when looking at measures of changes in positive affect (e.g., increase in life satisfaction). Due to the question wording, we were not able to differentiate between different types and intensities of support. Interpretation of these results should take account of the limitations of the study. The effect of decreases in intergenerational support, however, decreases with mortality rates.
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From a social cognitive perspective, interventions that target parents’ self-compassionate beliefs and re-orient parents to recognizing their personal strengths may bolster parenting competence and emotion regulation with subsequent benefit to their children’s coping (Morelli et al., 2020). The pandemic will likely have the most intense, enduring effect on children’s developmental trajectories as COVID-19 continues to pervade and disrupt their family, social, and academic spheres (Benner and Mistry, 2020). Conversely, children in Distressed families had poor mental and emotional health during shelter-in-place and continued to exhibit the most behavioral difficulties during Fall 2020. Considering our examination of auxiliary predictors of these family functioning profiles, parent’s use of cognitive reappraisal and child emotionality consistently distinguished Thriving families from Managing, Struggling, and Distressed families, and other specific factors within the examined domains provided further distinctions.
These studies highlight the need to study moderators of stress during high stress events both during and after the events. The public health emergency due to Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that started more than 2 years ago required significant measures to ensure infection control that resulted in public health, social and economic challenges worldwide. While such measures have been used in previous research (e.g., Chen et al., 2021), future studies should employ validated multi-item scales to more comprehensively capture the nuances of perceived social support. First, the data of this study was cross-sectional, which limits the ability to infer causality or directionality in the observed relationships.
